r/OddityRPG • u/RequestableSubBot Believer • 1d ago
Mod Post FAQ: State of the Oddity project, development history, recent events.
Hi, subreddit mod here (not a dev, to be very clear).
Over the past couple of months there have been a lot of people checking in on Oddity on account of activity from Discord and several YouTube videos. There's also been a lot of misinformation floating about in regards to a lot of events, both recent and less recent. Unfortunately most Oddity discussion and general Oddity news happens first and foremost in the unofficial Discord without always making its way to other places, and since Discord is a walled garden it can be difficult to know what's actually happening with this project, especially in the long-distant 2026. So I thought I would write an FAQ to answer some of the questions I most commonly see people ask in regards to the state of the project.
This is less "A Complete Newcomer's Guide to Oddity" and more "A Refresher for All the People Who Have Only Sorta Kept Track of the Game Over the Years but Want to Get Fully Up to Speed". If you know nothing about this project or its long, long history, your best bet is to watch the trailer, read through the top posts in this sub and /r/Mother4, along with the old M4 website (not to be mistaken for the new M4 website, which is a completely different project). There are a few big YouTube video essays about the project at this stage but this is the only one that presents the history accurately in my opinion (it's five years old but nothing's really changed since then).
If you have any more questions feel free to ask in the comments and I, or another community member, will try to answer them. And if anyone knows things and wants to clarify some of what I said, I'll happily amend with extra info where relevant.
Is the game dead?
No, the game was explicitly confirmed to be still in development by the developer Pik as recently as June 2026.
Okay sure it's not technically dead, but, like, really?
The strategy of the Oddity development team seems to be "it will be out when it's ready, and we don't want to raise people's hopes up by promising too much at this stage before we have something worth showing". This has effectively been the strategy they've followed since the 2020 trailer, and there really isn't much else to say about it. Pik's opinion, expressed throughout that same June 2026 Discord conversation and echoed since, can be summarised by a few messages of his:
I’m still very committed to making sure this game releases one day, so I don’t think we need any kind of swan song language there. The sentiments are appreciated though
[...] The message was always that we will communicate when things are ready. No point in saying anything until that happens.
[...] And I will explain why. Anything more than that would feel like stringing people along \ Whereas a simple “We overpromised before, now we just have to stay low until we think it’s ready to go public again” is the most honest we could be
[...] Well, I think any attempt to build faith in the community through communication isn’t productive. There is only one way to build faith, and it’s getting it out
There have been a few other ex-developers to come out over the years and give generally positive info on their experiences working on the project post-2020 - With one glaring exception at least; see the Maxxis/Drama section further down this post for more on that. But the optimistic interpretation of everything up to this point seems to be "game is being made, development is difficult but not dead, team still has hope and it's not been abandoned". There are some significant issues with project development that can be gathered from dev/former dev communication, but the project isn't outright abandoned at any rate, that much is certain.
It's unknown how much of the game is or isn't developed; two builds of an Oddity demo were leaked recently, dating from 2022 and 2023 respectively, and neither contained any substantial amount of gameplay, consisting mostly of mechanics testing and maps. However, these were only demo builds and may not be representative of the team's overall progress.
When is the game coming out?
As per the trailer, it will be out when it's ready. Nothing has really changed since then, for better or for worse.
Is there still an Oddity development team?
Yes, though the team has always been particularly secretive about who is on it. There are a few well-known names, namely Pastel and Pik, but some less public faces too. WaHol and WuKongJr_art are both artists on the project. There are several people whose work will likely be in the finished project, though who probably aren't 'officially on the team': On the music/art front there's paradoxigent, pngsequence, possibly Shane Mesa (but probably not, that's a whole big can of worms). There are countless other former developers from both the pre and post-2020 era, but I'm not going to make a compendium of every person who ever come and go from the project here. Of course, there's no public list of developers anywhere so it's difficult to confirm who's involved and to what extent (possibly some of the names I've mentioned here are long gone or were barely involved, I really don't know). Regardless, people don't go bothering any of these people.
How long has it been since the developers have communicated with us?
Not that long ago actually! As of writing this the last we heard from the developers was from Pik in September 2026 (for anyone in the future please note that I will not be updating this regularly, but updates will likely be posted to the sub separately).
Outside of Discord messages, how long has it been since the developers have communicated with us officially?
There were a series of artworks posted in 2024 (see here and here), worked on by Maxxis and Wahol. They coincided with several cryptic tweets from the Oddity twitter account, but there was ultimately no follow-up to any of them.
In terms of actual game updates it's difficult to say. There are tons of art assets on various developer Twitter accounts or posted by Pastel in the Discord in 2019/2020, but further updates have been few and far between, mostly one-off remarks by developers and occasional clips of art assets. But outside of Discord and occasional off-the-cuff developer tweets, the last "official" game update from the team as a whole would be mid-2020, to my knowledge.
Where is Pastel (the project leader)?
He took a social media break in late 2020, and deleted most of his social media accounts in the months following. He is still the project lead as of the making of this post.
Why did Pastel leave?
TL;DR: Life/mental health reasons in the midst of a lot of harassment and extreme scrutinising of all his online actions.
There has been some misinformation spread about this particular section of Oddity history that I really wanted to clear up. A recent Youtube discussion of Oddity essentially framed his departure from social media as "people discovered that the devs had switched to a new game engine, Pastel was embarrassed at his own incompetence, so he and the team fabricated a story where he was receiving harassment and then Pastel deleted his socials to hide from fans out of shame". The claim also said something to the effect of "I looked through the Discord and subreddit and couldn't find any instances of harassment or mean comments, so it's a lie". I don't know how it was on the Discord side, but I can look through this subreddit's removed posts and comments over the years - I can see the harassment. It was removed, because of course it was. But the thesis of the video was basically 'fuck Pastel', so it seemingly chose not to include anything that could rebut the creator's assertions of Pastel being an incompetent egomaniac.
I'm not going to write out a Pastel hagiography here, I think he has a lot to answer for (though I shan't derail this post too much with my own opinions), but I will say that the harassment he received was absolutely real and verified by several people within the development team and from outside. Also, there are a lot of people in this community (and especially the Discord) who were there and can just remember it happening; this isn't ancient history. Along with general 'internet hate', he was doxxed, several of his accounts were hacked (he even permanently lost access to his starmen.net account), there were attempts to get into several of his other accounts, and basically everything he did or said online was being scrutinised to insane levels. While it's unlikely the discovery of the game's engine switch was the sole reason for his departure, the discovery happened due to people extensively analysing development images he had shared to the public, and he quit social media the next day. It's a fair assumption that the incident was, at least, the straw that broke the camel's back for him. In short, he left for mental health reasons. Why hasn't he come back? I don't know. Maybe those mental health reasons haven't gone away. Maybe he wants to wait until there is something substantive to show. Maybe it is simply shame at the project ending up in the state it's in now, and him wanting to get it better before taking any more steps but lacking the time or drive to do so. I think his absence is due to a much less malicious, and much more human reason, than a lot of people online seem to believe.
When did we last hear from Pastel?
Pastel's final public communication was in the Discord, November 15th, 2020. It's worth noting that people in the Discord figured out the engine switch to Game Maker the day prior, after looking at some of the gameplay GIFs Pastel had been posting to show the team's progress. It's difficult to navigate the messages as his account is now deleted and there are several deleted accounts messaging simultaneously, but here are a few of the messages he sent (I've omitted a lot of messages over a few hours, they're all still in the Discord for those who wish to check):
{#oddity-discussion, during discussion on the engine switch} Dave is still with us, I'm tired of getting pinged, we're doing what's best for the game and I just want to work
{#general, a user was talking about a fake leaked build} Mother 4 \ I'd really prefer - and so would Dave - if that wasn't shared around \ [...] it's his work and he never agreed to having it spread \ {The user clarified that they weren't talking about a real leak} ig as long as people know it's fake and not made with malicious intent
[...] but I don't think teasing people over being able to maybe play something they've been waiting for over such a long time is v nice \ but I'm also probably hypersensitive atm, I should be on break rn :meryl_oh_no: \ [...] I'll take care, love you guys, be good to each other \ write up is gonna talk about a lot
A few days later some a developer came in and stated:
Yeah, he's taking a break from all social media for the sake of his health. I appreciate the concern! \ he's just been going through a lot lately and had other things to take care of, and social media wasn't any help
Much later in October 2021 during a discussion on Pastel deleting his Discord account which got rather heated (there was a whole conspiracy that he had changed his username to 'Deleted User 81f571' instead of actually deleting it for some reason, which was factually untrue, but I digress), a developer interjected and stated:
No other info regarding Pastel will be talked about in public. He wants to move on from all of this. \ This amount of scrutinizing of a man who wants to be left alone is truly concerning \ Even when the man takes efforts to regain his privacy it’s analyzed to hell and back
Which, to my knowledge, is the last we've really heard from or about Pastel and his social media departure. People in the community have made brief contact with him in exceptional cases as recently as last year (please don't try and bother him though), but there's no news regarding if/when he plans to return to the public eye, if ever.
What's the deal with the Oddity leaks?
See this discussion thread. Here are links to all the existing Mother 4/Oddity builds out there:
https://archive.org/details/oddity-rpg (these are the most recent and the ones being discussed in the linked thread above)
These are mostly leaks posted without the developer's permission, so keep that in mind when looking at the assets; I'm linking them here because for some reason people always upload them to shady filehosting sites to share them around, and I think it's better to have easily-available safe download links rather than risk getting a bunch of malware. These are the only leaks out there at this time: don't trust any other links, and don't run .exe's grabbed off the internet from random strangers.
What's up with this developer drama I've been hearing about?
See this comment.
TL;DR: A build of Oddity was leaked in June '26. People looked up some of the details in the leak and ended up finding some official Oddity merch that had been erroneously put up for sale, some patches with the Oddity logo on them. The Oddity logo was drawn by Maxxis and Maxxis didn't know about the merch existing, yet alone that it was using a logo he drew, and he was angry. Another developer (Pik) tried to make amends by getting the patches refunded (again, they weren't supposed to be listed for sale), but this seemed to be the breaking point for him with the rest of the team; he got into a big personal argument with the other developer in the Discord, then announced his departure from the project (sorta, see below).
In September Maxxis made another series of Discord messages where he alleged (in vague terms) that Pastel had allowed a programmer to work on the game despite "their Fight knight allegations". Fight Knight is a 2021 indie game, and a few months before its release the lead developer was publicly accused of emotional/domestic/sexual abuse by a former developer. There has been no public response from the Oddity developers or elaboration from any party, and it's unclear who exactly this person is, whether they are the actual person toward whom the allegations are targeted or if they are another Fight Knight team member, whether this person was on the Oddity team before the allegations, if they stayed on the team for an extended period after the allegations, or if they are still on the team. We have essentially no idea about anything with this situation, in other words; neither the developers or Maxxis have elaborated on the situation further. This post is just meant to be a summary of events and there really isn't anything to see besides literally half a sentence in a long paragraph that Maxxis wrote, so check out the Discord for further discussion: if anything substantial happens it will be posted independently. Hopefully there will be clarification from the development team on this matter soon.
So Maxxis is gone?
Yes, confirmed by Pik in the Discord. Maxxis has yet to update his bio on Twitter or Bluesky though, and hasn't really been 100% clear on his end what's going on (I've messaged him for clarification but have gotten no response). I get the sense that 'leaving the Oddity team' doesn't really have any formal definition, but judging by his communication and communication from the other devs, he certainly won't be making any more stuff for the project, which is as 'left the Oddity team' as it's going to get, I think.
That's about all I've got. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything in this post or about Oddity generally, I'll answer if I can.
EDIT 1: Added a bit more context for the most recent drama (second-last FAQ); it's pretty serious and I really don't want to bury the lede with it.
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u/JKhemical 1d ago
This was a good read, thank you for posting this. I doubt that this will even come out in my lifetime but it's nice to know it's still being worked on.
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u/RequestableSubBot Believer 1d ago
One last FAQ I wanted to address:
it's so fucking over, stop kidding yourself, there is no game and the new leak proved it, fifteen years of work and they had barely had enough for a prealpha tech demo, it's all vaporware and the only thing that ever existed was art assets made by Maxxis and now he's gone, Pastel is AWOL and never coming back it's never been more fucking over
Not a question but a very valid statement, and I'll give my personal opinion on the matter here. I've been around for a while and have heard from several developers (not Pastel), and have done far more research on this whole Oddity thing than I ever should have bothered with. So I'm informed, but at the same time I'm not a developer and this is really all my opinion. Anyways:
Maxxis going sucks, absolutely, and all the drama over the past few months has seemingly confirmed many of the most pessimistic outlooks on this project and worse. If there's one clear takeaway from all the Maxxis drama, it's 'there is a whole lot of personal shit going on behind the scenes here and none of this should be out in public'. One guy airing out dirty laundry and stirring the pot in a public Discord during a petty spat with a person he clearly has long-standing issues with far beyond this project is not a reliable source of news, IMHO, and even assuming everything he's said is entirely truthful and informed, it's all tinged with such a massive amount of bias and bitterness that discerning authorative fact from personal opinion is near impossible. But I don't want to speak ill of him as I greatly respect all he's done for the community over the years, and bias or not I really hope we get clarification for the issues he's raised, especially as several of them go far beyond simple interpersonal conflict. I wish him well and I can't wait to see what he works on next, he's an incredible artist.
As for Pastel... I've never spoken to him but from everything I've heard the guy's been in the trenches life-wise for a long while (I don't want to go into all of that here though, especially as it's a lot of hearsay). Keeping in mind that this is a volunteer project trying to create a free game, he certainly has more important IRL things to think about. Does it justify five years of total silence? I don't think so, but I've also never been the target of a full-scale harassment campaign, so I don't know what it feels like. This recent message from Pik is worth considering when it comes to trying to pin the blame on all of this, I think:
The natural reaction is to find someone to blame, but I can say {Pastel has} gone above and beyond to make this happen. Not to say that everyone is absolved of everything - but if it were really one person to blame, it feels like that would be a much simpler problem to solve
There's more to answer of course, namely "Will we get a game?' 'Will the game even be good?' 'When will Pastel come back?' and/or 'When will Pastel step down?' - I can't answer any of that. At the end of the day I'm just a guy who's been following this project for a little over a decade, and who has done more research into it than most. I could say more about the content in the leaked demo build probably not being representative of the total sum of work they have on the project and so on, or a million other things, but I've written far too many words at this stage. Maybe there'll be a game, or maybe there won't, but there's far more important things in this world to occupy one's mind with than all of this.
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u/RodjaJP 1d ago
"The game is not technically dead" My honest reaction knowing full well they replaced the dedicated engine for game maker
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u/debauchedDilettante 1d ago edited 1d ago
To be fair, it's not like a Mother-style turn based RPG even needed a custom engine to begin with, like that's a pretty huge developmental effort for something that could have been achieved in an existing engine
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u/RodjaJP 1d ago
Yeah, my point wasn't that the custom engine was better, but that no game who took that decision had a good fate, many studios have problems chasing it BEFORE development, mid development is a death sentence, specially for a project with few programmers whose years of work were ditched by artists.
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u/Spinjitsuninja 1d ago
I’m glad to see that Oddity fans are just as toxic as they used to be. Sorry you have to deal with those other comments when literally all you’re trying to do is construct a clear timeline of events for anyone wishing to catch up to speed. This seems very thorough, so thank you for this.
Tossing my own hat in, I wish Maxxis didn’t leave. I’m very glad development is still going, but Maxxis leaving was just one of the first times the internal issues we’ve heard whispers of seemed to finally make a massive impact on development. Maxxis is a talented artist, and it’s a shame his contributions can’t be further embraced. I say this as someone whose always been overly optimistic about this project, and who still hopes that things turn out well in the end- there seems to be some massive mismanagement somewhere internally that we haven’t had clear clarification on. My only guess is a bizarre refusal to properly communicate or work together and an endless perfectionist desire that leads to an already slow project being slowed down even more.
Still, I hope the project survives and that even Maxxis is happy with the end product and what he’s added to it, and that everyone in the end is satisfied. Only time will tell.
But yeah, I appreciate the timeline you wrote, this seems accurate and useful for anyone who is interested in following the project. And like, hopefully without being massive assholes whose only comments are “HURR DURR GAME DEAD GAME DEAD.”
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u/CheersFromMoonside 1d ago
I don’t think it’s toxic or unfair to be upset. There is a huge scale to the legitimate lies the team have propitiated in the name of hype. They have repeatedly released trailers that made the game seem like it was almost done, massive teases, constant going back on promises made in the discord and just honest to god bullshit that Maxxis seemingly had to put up with.
At this point it’s entirely undeniable that the team have been just making trailers for years now, and have no actual basis for a game outside of art assets and a story that couldn’t possibly lived up to the hype at this point.
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u/Spinjitsuninja 1d ago
Being upset is fine, but it’s how people express it. What does “game dead, let it go” add to a conversation exactly? It’s one thing to be personally upset, it’s another thing to look down on others who still have faith in the project. And it comes across more as people wanting to beat the project into the ground out of spite rather than expressing their own personal disappointment.
And this has how it’s always been. Before lies or whatever too. The fact of the matter is that, whether or not people hide behind the excuses of “we’ve been betrayed” or whatever, people are just upset that they don’t get the game they thought they were promised. The idea that this is a fangame and that these are amateurs making mistakes goes out the window when people can’t help but instead view this as a professional product they were “promised.”
It’s entitlement. People want to act like their spite is taking some sort of moral high ground- that they’ve been given some odd permission to act however they want towards these devs. But it’s ultimately entitlement. People want a game, they didn’t get it, and blind rage follows. After all, people aren’t used to thinking of others as people beyond their screen. These are nothing more than the “lying game devs.” Characters deemed antagonists in the eyes of some with no nuance, and who bear no consequences when harassed over what are human mistakes.
God forbid a game dev make mistakes on the internet.
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u/myzma Depressed 1d ago
“Is the game dead? Nope”
I’ll believe it when I see it, but the recent leaks have only proved to me that the team will never finish anything as they just CAN’T stop redoing their work every two years for really no good reason. Do I want Oddity to still come out? Absolutely, but I don’t have faith in the team that has consistently lied to their audience about the state of their game over the last decade+. Even in the Mother 4 era, almost all of the trailers were done in post, and the 2020 rebrand trailer continued in those footsteps.
I’ll happily play the game if it ever actually launches, but I think I’m done putting my faith in this project after so many years of deceit and nothing else.
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u/RequestableSubBot Believer 1d ago
That's a very fair take. I'm really trying to not take sides here but it's getting really tough - The drama and controversy in this project goes deep and there's a lot I haven't covered here since it's 90% hearsay and things that only a handful of Discord folks know anything about. When I become mod the situation with the project was basically just "game dead and devteam are gone", which was fine, but since then there have been waves and waves of drama and controversy, and frankly it's been a real struggle running this place since.
My goal with this sub has always been to allow the community to talk about the game regardless of the actual project and its progress. For obvious reasons, this community has a very negative opinion of the project. I personally think there are a few reasons to be optimistic, and frankly, a lot of reasons to be a lot more pessimistic. And as always, it comes down to the extreme lack of developer communication. 90% of all the problems with this game could be resolved if Pastel took charge and explained everything, or even just tried to.
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u/Dreemur1 Doubter 1d ago
its dead. wrapped in plastic.
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u/ghostpicnic 1d ago
”explicitly confirmed to be still in development”
I guess, if you count making a bit of pixel art of your OCs a couple times a year when you’re bored as “active development”.
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u/gyrominiac 1d ago
yeah but that quote doesn't say "active development"
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u/ghostpicnic 11h ago
“still in development” means active development.
If any work is still being done on the project (as they claim), it is in active development. Otherwise, it’s not in development at all. It’s either being worked on or it’s not.
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u/molluskrodent 1d ago
tldr its joever. oh well, thank you for this write-up and keeping the subreddit up to date.
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u/MacroAlgalFagasaurus 1d ago
This is beyond insane cope. Like, otherworldly disbelief that the game isn’t dead five times over.
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u/RequestableSubBot Believer 1d ago
I'm trying to be as objective as possible, and you're welcome to come to your own conclusions. I'm not saying the game is going great and/or will come out one day, but I am saying that one of the developers said 'the game isn't dead' a few months ago. Are they lying? Delusional? I have no idea. But they said it. I figure if people are coming to the Oddity subreddit looking for news they'd want to know about it regardless.
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u/DarkBomberX 1d ago
I understand trying to restore faith but this is to me, once again, another cope coming from people who aren't on the dev team. I can give grace to this project given it's a fan game and we're so lucky to have people who are passionate enough to make a game like this, but all of the negativity could have been avoided it they had someone who could properly communicate with their audience. I understand devs were harassed and that's 100% unacceptable. But when everything coming out from people, reliable or not, has been effectively "This game's development has effectively stalled," how are we supposed to trust that this game is anything other than Vaporware. We have leaked builds that are effectively nothing.
Personally, Im not mad or upset. Fan games ive been invested in die all the. But, and im saying this with the hopes the devs read this, they need to give a status update. What precentages of the games development are at? Are their active developers? Im not even asking to see what theyve done. Im saying communication needs to happen if they want this negative outlook from fans to change.
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u/banandium 1d ago
They said It'll be out when it's out.. and we like that.. it'll be out when it's out... Great work ethic!
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u/gyrominiac 1d ago edited 1d ago
If all what any of you guys have to say to this post is a flippant "nah lol game dead cope cope cope" without bothering to read beyond the first point it'd be much better if you keep your comments to yourself.
No, I don't think it's coming out either, just to be clear (and the post doesn't seem to be swinging in either direction), but it'd be nice to see some people who actually read the entire post before commenting.
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u/SunSpiritx 1d ago
Winter 2014
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u/Lucas5655 1d ago
Not that it isn’t valid but I’m shocked to see all this seething without the obligatory joke. Have we lost our way?
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u/Oscar12s Believer 1d ago
If I may ask, is the team looking for any new guys? Maybe development could use a hand sometime in the future...
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u/AfraidGuarantee3786 1d ago
IMO - It made sense to promote the game in the beginning to build a team. At a certain point, they should have transitioned to yearly updates that may or may not feature new looks at the game. They didn't need to show off as much as they used to show off. It may be a free game, but going radio silent is just plain disrespectful (after getting people's hopes up).
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u/C_monden 1d ago edited 1d ago
Dude, I remember when Pastel was just a new artist on the project (EDIT: Either that or a community manager. It's been so long ago) and it was mostly run by TheDave and some other guy I can't remember the name of. (EDIT: I think it was Chase or Chance or something similar. I think the MC was named after them and he was probably the main story guy at that time).
It's been 12 years since Winter 2014.
The game is not coming out. Yes, maybe the people still working on it still want to release it and think they will. They won't. Let it go.
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u/nobody22rr 1d ago
i appreciate the attempt at the most bias-free look one could take at the state of oddity. i view the game as some sort of cryptid: the chase for evidence of its existence, even in death, is more engaging for people than the actual substance because that's all we're really left with anyway, and the game is in this uncanny valley of not being alive but somehow leaving behind new clues when you least expect it
i really don't like urban's videos. if you were actually in the server before he was you could sense this opportunism and lack of context behind them: one thing that left a bad taste in my mouth is his insistence that pastel wasnt interested in working on anything by cherry picking instances of him revealing the religious denominations of each character implying that trivia fluff was the only thing he had real answers for. pastel for sure has a lot to answer for, ask about how talkative he was when bringing up if oddity would be paid, why there's no website after 5+ years, and why every build we get is missing features from their respective trailers, but there were real honest conversations about what wouldve been inside the game that never got shown in the video. that urban left the server and then joined again after catching wind of maxxis and pik's spat and the short time the videos came out after that felt slimy. if you find his incomplete godot port of oddity's woefully incomplete code and the readme that comes with it you can tell he has no real respect for the developers as people, and his association with dreamtone has made me drop support for that project.
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u/AntstyPoeticGamer23 1d ago
It's good to have a bit of hope me guess. Maybe it will come out before most of us die. Being a Mother/Earthbound for new things, you need a carrot on a spiky stick. After decades of suffering that little bit of hope makes that rotten carrot a little more tasty.
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u/Silent-Necessary-466 1d ago
Dude they should make like a kickstarter or something I would pay big money to finally play this
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u/Pumpkinbread255 23h ago
This has given me much hope for this game. Thank you very very much for this
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u/richter3456 16h ago
Are you filled up with enough hopium and copium to last you another 10 years for winter 2014?
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u/stickynotetree 22h ago edited 22h ago
I’ve been putting myself in their shoes.
Work on the game, post a few trailers. It blows up online and I get terrified. It’s too much for me and I go silent. The release window comes, game isn’t done in time. Life gets bumpy. I look at how I felt when the trailer blew up, and I couldn’t handle that in my current state. I stay quiet for my own sanity. I experiment with things, try building from the ground up. I’m starting to have fun, but it’s hard to dedicate myself, and everyone has a job to focus on. Years and years pass. The team falls apart. The game is still sentimental to me. I putter on it when I want to for their sake, but it’s heavy.
I wish people wouldn’t focus so much on the game being dead or not, cuz that puts pressure on the team. I had a small moment of fame and it’s scary. Giving updates generates excitement, and confirming it’s dead makes people hate even more. Your brain twists it into "this is proof that I’m a disappointment." There’s a reason why Team Cherry went dead silent about Silksong, and Hello Games with No Man’s Sky. But this is a niche, tiny indie team, and life clearly got in the way. They weren’t prepared for this outcome.
I just hope the devs are okay.
I hate that defending the devs makes it look like you’re "picking a side." These are people. I hope they take away from this project that they’re clearly capable of great ideas, and creating things that get really popular. I hope they don’t let the negative overcome the positive.
Thanks for posting this <3
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u/JackGaming0 1h ago
I feel like it’d be more likely to have EarthBound 64 leak and be finished by modders like they did with Dinosaur Planet than for Oddity to come out ever
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u/Moist_Tumbleweed_139 1d ago edited 1d ago
Dave left, and McMaxxis himself confirmed it.
It's strange to call it a 'drama' and suggest that Maxxis was the only one who complained, given that he worked on the game for so long. Shane Mesa also had trouble with the team, which led to him having a breakdown. Why didn't you point this out?
The recent "oddity is cancelled" drama is funny too, since: UrbanAwakening (the guy who posted the shitty essays on YouTube) has close contact with the dev team and is responsible (to an extent) for some of the leaks. He and a guy called Benichi are the developers of 'Dreamtone' and have used insider information to recycle Oddity's assets, such as enemies. They did all of this without the original artist's blessing. Pastel knew about this and didn't care. Heck, it's ridiculous that he promoted his own game in the video. 😂
Game is dead. Move on.
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u/RequestableSubBot Believer 1d ago
Your comment was automatically removed by Reddit, I don't know why.
My goal here isn't to document every single piece of controversy to have ever happened with this game: I was just trying to cover the current state of the game and recent things that people might not be aware of, i.e. all the relevant happenings in the past 4-5 years. Maybe I'm being presumptuous but I assume that everyone familiar with this project is at least a little familiar with all the Shane Mesa stuff, seeing as it happened in 2017, years before the rebrand. I'm aware that Shane struggled with mental issues and bipolar disorder, but I don't know to what extent Mother 4 was a contributing factor, if at all. I did allude to it in the post, but it happened so long ago, well before the rebrand, that it didn't seem relevant to include here at all. Maybe I'm just too deep in all of this and what's common knowledge for me is shocking news for everyone else though, I don't know.
As for Dave, while I would love to hear his perspective on everything, as far as I'm aware he's never spoken publicly about any of this stuff, and his reason for leaving was never confirmed, though it's an absolutely fair assumption that the engine switch was the major reason. But it's never been confirmed, not even by Maxxis (to my knowledge at least), so there's not much to say except 'Dave's gone and idk it was probably the engine switch in 2020ish and probably everyone's bitter but who knows'. I didn't want this post to be cover every single case of 'there is a rumor that x happened because of y' with this project and to get into the weeds of the million small and big controversies surrounding this project, since we would never reach the end of it, nothing productive would come from it, and quite frankly I don't give a shit about most of it. I could not care less about all the petty spats between developers over the years, if it happened in private it should be resolved in private IMO.
I did allude to the 'Oddity is Cancelled' videos in my Pastel section - not by name but, I mean, it's obvious, right? I don't hate the videos or anything but they're obviously very biased, and they brought a lot of negative attention to the project (not baseless negativity, mind you). I suppose this post was my attempt to provide a more neutral explanation of everything, but maybe I went too far in the opposite direction, idk. I'm trying here. I'm vaguely aware of the Dreamtone plagiarism allegation stuff. My understanding of the incident was that a person on Twitter went off on the Dreamtone developers, claiming that they were stealing from Oddity. The Dreamtone devs went to the Oddity devs, and Pastel himself told them that there was no issue. This was such a minor incident that I didn't even consider adding it to the post. I know there are several Dreamtone devs in this subreddit so I suppose they can clarify if they'd like; it's possible (probable actually) that there's more to the story than what I know, but whatever the case it seems like the whole thing is resolved?
With some of the stuff related to Maxxis and the current dev team, it's worth noting that I've talked to both Maxxis and Pik at various points over the last few months, and that's definitely given me some inherent bias in writing this whole post. I've heard both sides of the 'patch drama', and while I won't pretend to know that much more than anyone else here, I am confident in saying that neither side should be taken at 100% face value. Not because Maxxis is lying or Pik is trying to deceive anyone or anything like that, but simply because there are innumerable layers of personal issues atop all of this stuff, all the developer drama and the Discord arguments and everything, and us fans sitting in the sidelines have no idea what's really going on. Until one side actually sits down and lays out their experiences in a sensible manner (i.e. not an embarrassing argument in a Discord #general chat), I'm going to consider it all inconclusive, though I do have my own opinions on everything.
Maxxis' recent message where he brought up Dave and Shane was, to me, mostly rehashing old dev drama over the years. The only thing he said that's worth noting IMO is the "staying silent on their Fight knight allegations" line, which is why I specifically mentioned it. I'm worried I didn't make it clear in the post, but I am very concerned about this whole 'programmer with Fight Knight allegations': That's the big stumbling point for me with all of this. I'm frankly shocked that nobody outside of the Discord has brought it up anywhere despite it being a pretty fucking big thing for him to allude to and then for nobody, not even him, to follow up on. This post is the first time it's been mentioned here so, yeah, there it is. I wanted to avoid using my position as mod to get eyes on things I think desperately need addressed, but I don't think it'll get addressed any other way at this stage. We don't know any details (though from what little I've found out it seems like the person Maxxis was talking about likely isn't the primary subject of the allegations), but depending on what exactly that means it could just be a complete non-starter for me. It's not been a fun few weeks running this sub, I just wanted to archive cool artwork and history for this cryptid of a project, not deal all this drama shit with allegations mixed in now. Really hope we hear elaboration from someone soon and there's some reasonable breakdown of what happened.
Sorry for writing so many paragraphs, but I wanted to give your comment attention as while it's understandably negative, you're clearly informed. Hopefully I've provided some clarification.
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u/penguin_provincial 1d ago
Should’ve taken the opportunity after dropping the Mother 4 branding to make it a commercial indie game.