It’s horror in the sense that Bioshock was horror, but much less so. There are some areas with ‘tension’ that you pretty quickly become accustomed to, just as you would in a game where there is a ‘progression’ of areas where each area you move into is quite difficult at first until you get the resources and build the new items from that area.
I highly recommend it on a vr device if possible, but to everyone who has played it knows, it has its moments. But its not as wrote as a run of the mill horror game, i may have given the game a disservice labeling it as such.
The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025
The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like “10% of net profit, capped at $250 million”.
If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn’t pass the smell test.
That’s how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn’t be a bonus.
It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.
The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.
Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I’m not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it’s not my preference.
I’m also not defending Krafton’s decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that’s impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?
And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme (“a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”). So I’m really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don’t add up to explain how it’s actually bad.
The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.
I wonder how much of this is true. Statement from the publisher
On Thursday, Krafton issued another statement addressed to “our 12 million fellow Subnauts.” The company said 90% of the $250 million payout was allocated to Unknown Worlds’ three senior leaders. Krafton accused the executives of abandoning their responsibilities in order to work on other projects, including a film, leading to delays for the game.
Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked…
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities… with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out… and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state… but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn’t, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or… maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
Name recognition sells stuff. Somebody who loved KSP 1 will probably give KSP 3 a go, at least to a greater probability than an unrelated game in the same genre.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken…but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because “it would speed up development.”
Having worked in software dev and db management professionally, and having been modding (as in making mods) all kinds of games for even longer… yep, I knew it was completely fucked almost immedeately, as soon as it was:
Throw out most of the old dev team
We are gonna rebuild the engine/game from the ground up
Add in vastly complex features and capabilities at the same time
On a horrendously unrealistic timeframe.
…
Normally, any two of those is extreme danger zone.
Coffee Stain’s another good example on the bigger end.
It does seem like there’s a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.
I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don’t agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game’s learning curve less precipitous.
Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.
Makes sense, wasn’t untrue and I wasn’t criticizing, just wanted to make sure everyone remembers that the problem goes up the chain due to capitalism.
Various companies/games were mentioned in the comments, but I think a good example is Hello Games. Clearly fumbled their game launch and were over ambitious with No Man’s Sky.
But it’s gotten an incredible amount of things that were promised, and many things that weren’t, all as free updates. Sure, they’re still making money, that’s the point, but instead of Micro-transactions, overpriced DLC, fucking over the devs, shutting things down, they just keep rolling. I’m sure they’ve gotten offers of acquisition that were probably very lucrative, but they didn’t take them, and have continued their slow roll of making gamers happy.
I think Croteam has been able to have moderate success over the years, but being based in Eastern Europe might make them insulated from issues. Devolver only recently bought them, but they seem to be one of the few good publishers. I at least didn’t see their name on the Video Games Europe member list that’s opposed to SKGs.
It would make sense for it to be canon in the subnautica universe. I think they were pretty much the epitome of authors with an anvil with the references to economics and governing.
iam death stranding what i learned Balancing gaming with breaks improves focus and reaction time a lot. Even a 5-minute stretch every hour can keep you sharp for longer sessions.
The difference is that the Steam Deck actually uses fairly traditional controls. Two joysticks, face buttons, d-pad (not that anyone uses the d-pad), multiple back triggers.
This thing was been really weird with its three analogue inputs (how am I supposed to use three analogue inputs) and every other button was limited. It also existed in a world where I can just get an Xbox controller and plug it into my PC, and it just works, so what’s the point anyway?
This thing isn’t even particularly good at controlling the steam deck, which kind of proves the point that it never really made sense as a product.
We definitely are, Valve has single-handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform, but in the process became indispensable. Thanks to Gabe they’ve been rather good in that respect. However, whoever replaces him might not be as good as him.
They can’t replace him with a suit. There should be a shaman council that speaks with his spirit to make further decisions for Valve after his passing or retirement (they can just speak directly in this case).
Making great progress! Bill is such a great character. He’s turned his town into a fortress occupied only by him. Sounds great until you realize he’s been alone for years. It’s less of a fortress and more of a prison and, with the way he talks to himself, you get the sense that the isolation is starting to wear on him. Even then, when given the opportunity to leave, he doesn’t. He’s going to die alone in that place because he sees trusting others as a weakness. Something he tries to impress onto Joel. But does Joel want to be like Bill? Does he want to be like Tess? Such a great chapter!
I really liked Bill, but yeah. His loneliness definitely seems to be taking a toll. It’s weird because this is the second character named Bill i’ve seen that his loneliness problems
Night and day difference between game Bill and show Bill, too. Both characters are interesting explorations of attachment vs isolation in their own ways.
Ive never been a fan of joysticks, so when they announced this I was super excited for the track pads. I wanted to love them, but I could never get used to them. They feel super unnatural, even for FPS, to the point where I was longing for joysticks.
One thing I think it was missing is some kind of native API. It emulated keyboard/mouse or gamepad, or both. And it kind of worked, but sometimes a bit clunky. Like if you tried to use it as mouse for aiming and as gamepad stick game would be confused and switch control hints from gamepad to keyboard/mouse and back.
With native API developers could’ve directly implement it as another type of controller and add things like hints saying “use right trackpad to aim”, tweek controls mapping for it’s layout, sensitivity, etc
Not sure how many developers would’ve supported that though
Prey was great in that department actually having a config that mapped mouse to the right touchpad instead of emulating a joystick like so many games did, and then had different action sets that automatically switched depending on if it was gameplay or you were in the menu. And showed proper icons like the touchpad click to reflect Steam Input mappings people set it to.
I got a $50 GameStop gift card in 2015 as part of some hackathon I went to— which was cool since as a kid didn’t have a credit card or anything; and bought the steam controller with it, would play CS:GO with it between class. Still my favorite controller and one of the only ones that lets you change the turn on sound too.
I’ve been trying to not use Steam on linux for a while now unless necessary (I have too many games there). GoG + Heroic keeps me pretty sane. Otherwise it’s Lutris for starting them (which I’ll agree is VERY clunky but you can get things done). I think we’re actually getting over the hill of “Linux gaming means Steam” that we’ve been on since the SteamDeck launched.
While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?
This is a pretty valid-ish concern I would say. It’s one of the reasons I’m using GoG mainly now (which yes, still buying licences so similar concerns just maybe not as great or maybe I’m kidding myself)
GOG is legit though. You can archive those offline installers and they’ll work forever (barring future OS incompatibilities etc). For the titles that support it I use the Linux installers otherwise I just run Galaxy through Steam for the time being since it reduces the amount of wineprefixes I have to configure with Steam.
I wouldn’t say we’re over-reliant on Steam, but maybe on Valve to some extent.
If Valve would suddenly stop all their work on/around Linux, that’d certainly affect Proton and also things like the open AMD GPU drivers. Sure, others would likely continue their work (it’s not like they’re doing it all alone now anyway), but Valve certainly brings a lot of expertise and also commercial interest.
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