Phoenix was the best place I’d ever worked until they came along. Fucking bitcoin bros destroyed everything because they didn’t understand the games industry.
You can blame crypto bros but the original owners sold out. Once a studio has been swallowed up by a conglomerate it is only a matter of time before it turns to shit.
The owners might have had no choice though because they took a ton of venture capital funding.
I’ve realized that it’s best to just avoid any company that takes VC because they will inevitably fuck everyone over.
I wish I could get more into this, but yes there were some major missteps during the covid/post-covid “stocks are crazy high, money is free!” period. After that there just wasn’t really a way to recover.
Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to avoid VC money, the tech industry runs on it.
If you worked on Dauntless, just want to say I appreciate your part! Only played it for a while at release because the grind turned me off but it’s been sad seeing news pop up of how it has been going downhill. Was such a fun game.
Sucks that good game devs get laid off because the leaders are asleep at the wheel unless it involves monetization.
Not really surprising after they destroyed what was left of the game and its community with the most recent update. I’m really not sure why anyone thought that was a good idea
It’s a shame, because I liked it more than Monster Hunter, but it’s always online, so it’s inevitable that eventually it stops making money, and the next step is that it disappears forever.
I played it on release and it was a fun time with friends. A few years back Phoenix Labs was bought out by another company, and it was all downhill from there. It really is a shame, Dauntless was a neat game.
I tried it at one point before trying any Monster Hunter games, and I found it really boring. I was legitimately getting drowsy when fighting the second monster and found it much easier to just chug a potion, rather than try to dodge its attacks. Monster Hunter World, on the other hand, was exhilarating from the first large monster you hunt. So… did Dauntless get better as you progressed?
It just got into the core fight, upgrade, fight loop way faster, without any of the tedious mechanics that I didn’t like from Monster Hunter, that I find boring. I played right around its launch on Epic, so who’s to say if we even played the same game, with the way these games can change over time?
Often times, the investors or stakeholders at these large video game companies have their backgrounds in Hollywood, or Tech. They then choose leadership who will run the company along the lines of what works well in those industries. This results in optimization being pretty damn near the bottom of the priorities.
What has been most profitable in Hollywood? Not the final quality of the movie, but the marketability. How many people did you get to come see it, doesn’t matter if they loved it, so long as they heard about it, then choose to buy a ticket.
What has worked well in tech? Getting to market as fast as possible with the latest technical developments. Doesn’t matter if it’s a buggy mess and riddled with technical debt, so long as we capture as much market share as possible before anyone else can compete.
Combine these two approaches and what do you get? The fanciest graphics, huge maps, endless procedural fetch quests to make it look big, all so people will preorder it. Oh and it needs to be done in 2 years or else someone else will beat us to being the fortnight of “live service extraction farming sims”.
So lots of demands on what needs to be in it, and no time to do proper QA, let alone optimize it, that will just have to be done in patches after launch.
The cost of poor optimization gets externalized to the customers who need to buy new hardware or run it on settings so low it could be mistaken for half-life.
Finally got around to trying Dwarf Fortress and I am in love lol. I’m really impressed with the UI changes the dev was able to pull off for the Steam release, I play perfectly comfortably using a custom config with my Steam controller.
@Cataphract I mostly agree with your assessment. If's a fun game. It's not great, it's just fine though. I played it, had fun with it, I think they did an amazing job with the castle and the setting then put and extremely mediocre RPG into it. They could have done so much more. I didn't feel like I wasted my time, but I also didn't feel like it was a great game at all. It's worth it, on sale for $20-40 max I'd say. If you're a huge potter fan it's a must play, if you're not, eh it's fine. Like Assassin's creed. It's fine.
However, how did they ever say no DLC? I will never understand this. They made a money printer for potter fans, the world is empty with barely anything to do in it. They could be cranking out DLC every quarter for this and I know people would be buying it. I thought these companies liked money, how the hell did they decide not to do that?
I will preface this by saying I’m a PC gamer who also has a Switch. Wife and I were gifted this game on the Switch and I knew going in it would be a subpar experience compared to the PC. That said, my wife was really into it and watching her okay made me want to pick it up also.
No it isn’t very deep and doesn’t bring any new mechanics to the table we haven’t seen already but the presentation, even on the limited horse power of the switch was nice. It was fun to explore the castle and build up your character. The game is easy to 100% though it can be a bit tedious to track down everything. If you like the potter-verse, I think it’s a pretty good game. Watch a video, grab it on sale, didn’t expect to have your mind blown.
I look forward to a sequel assuming they can improve on some of the repetition.
I played on PC, and had a great time. Like the other person said, it wasn’t intended for such a casual machine.
I really liked the interactive items, even though they were useless. It was fun to try roleplaying as a student sometimes. I didn’t find the enemies to be too clustered either. My personal favorite thing was flying around on the broom. The game world is pretty big so you have plenty of room to just do your thing.
Steam Input is super helpful with this. If I find that I’m consistently pressing wrong buttons on the controller, and the game doesn’t give you the ability to rebind controls in the menu (ew), then I just edit the profile in Steam Input and voila
People sleep on Steam Input, but it’s one of the more unsung features of the Steam Deck imo. Nobody ever talks about it, and I’ve even seen people say that they hate it which makes zero sense to me (just don’t use it?)
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