This honestly feels like an “everyone sucks here” situation. It’s obviously bad that the publisher just sacked the 3 founders of a developer and replaced them with a CEO from a developer they just scuttled… But then there is this terrible sell-out deal the devs went for where 1/3 of the sale price of the company was tied up in sales performance with the deadline rapidly approaching so of course they want to put out a shiny new title for people to buy even though they keep having to cut the planned content down to almost nothing. (supposedly, obvi I haven’t played it…)
AND THEN there is what I am calling Schrodinger’s Beta. It is supposedly right now ready for early access release (which means Krafton delaying the game is proof of being shady and avoiding the bonus), but also likely going to flop because they got rid of the founders and now they won’t have the devs to make it any good (making Krafton correct in delaying the EA because it isn’t ready yet…).
This whole thing is a mess of pointing fingers and no one knows what’s real. Truth of the matter is probably that both sides are right. Dev’s want to push the game out to get the rest of what they feel they are owed, whether the game is ready for EA be damned. Publisher wants to not pay for any of that, downsize the dev team to finish production as cheap as possible just to drop a steaming turd with just enough name recognition to keep their line going up, but not to make enough money they can’t plausible deniability sink another developer. I hope I’m wrong, because I was looking forward to Subnautica 2 (mostly just to have a multiplayer subnautica experience), but the industry has mostly convinced me to assume the worst in everyone.
I wonder if Microsoft’s shopping spree induced FOMO in Sony and they ended up buying shit. Sony already had the best studios but they chased live service for no reason.
Negative hundreds of millions of dollars. But the point still stands that they believed this was a rational way to make a boatload of money. With hindsight, we’re all geniuses, but yes, this was a stupid move.
i think the funniest part is ontop of bad acquisitions, Microsoft was only able to buy blizzard activision partially because sony had a history of making non PlayStation versions of games inferior to the PlayStation version.
had Sony actually played fair ball, none of this would have probably happened.
I’m over the massive, over-produced games. I looked at the price of the new Indiana Jones game (AUD119), and even though I loved Machine Games’ previous work, I noped out. These days, I’m mostly reverting to simple arcade games more akin to the early era of gaming I grew up on. Shotgun Cop Man, from the people that made My Friend Pedro, just came out. It was $13. Finished it in one sitting, but I’ll probably play it multiple times. Much better investment.
I think Titanfall 2 is still on sale on steam for uh… 5 dollars.
Its got Northstar, a custom client that allows for private multiplayer servers… also works on linux, literally has its own custom proton version.
Oh and there are mods as well, guided installers, mod managers, etc, for windows and linux.
Runs great on a steam deck!
… and looks … basically the same as a shooter from 10 years later, at least at 1280 x 800?
(its built on a custom forked version of the portal 2 source engine, so it actually runs efficiently and looks good =D)
Doesn’t have a huge playerbase, but it is decent enough that you can probably find a few well populated servers, at least in NA region.
… looks like titanfall 3 got turned into an extraction shooter and then cancelled.
So anyway yeah, hilariously its time to return to tradition for enthusiasts of many old school competetive games from before the bullshit of endless battlepasses and MTX kicked into high gear… and as others have pointed out, the indie scene is full of gems.
I just like to add that it has an oft forgotten 4 player PvE coop mode. Also low on players, but not dead, and if you’re lucky enough to have some friends you can guarantee a match. And there are usually populated Northstar servers for it as well. It’s a great mode with progression and the signature combat experience in Titan and as a pilot.
Yeah, but the writing was on the wall when it came to Xbox Game Pass a few months later. If Microsoft deal was better than burning its sales, then that was it.
Also, there was some other rumors that the sequel wasn’t green lit immediately since the sales of the first game didn’t meet EA expectations. Who knows it that can be attributed to missing Halloween and holidays.
I think Dead Space 2 remake will never come. Motive is working on the next BF and the Iron Man game, that look like safer investments than a sequel of a game that failed commercially (in their books).
I can understand this hesitation, but I don’t expect that from Larian, they’ve delivered in the past and I suspect they’ll deliver again.
(So had CD Projekt Red of course, but Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related, IIRC. Whereas Hello Games over-promised and under-delivered core features on No Man’s Sky.)
Let’s be straight: as amazing as Baldur’s Gate 3 is today, Act 3 launched half baked and half broken. My first playthrough experience was horrible, largely thanks to broken flags and missing content from the Upper City, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have comparable experiences with early versions of Original Sin 2. Hell, they rewrote basically the entire final act of that game with the definitive edition, and I’m under the impression Original Sin 1 had a similiar situation, though I didn’t play it enough between the original and the definitive edition to experience it.
Now, part of all this is because Larian opts to make decisions to cut content and reduce scope rather than abuse their staff or delay a project. In Baldur’s Gate specificslly, I won’t say I am perfectly happy with the outcome, but they are a good studio that practices reasonable employee ethics, and ultimately puts in the work to get there with the product as well. I’d have no issue buying Divinity day one or even pre-ordering, but I do not expect a perfectly complete and polished experience on release.
It still has bugs to this day. I played through the whole game two months ago. The printing press mission was extremely broken. It’s a mission where you are supposed to swap out the headline in a printing press so a magazine doesn’t shit-talk your party. The mission progressed as intended, the press even praised me for swapping the article out and on the next day I still got shit-talked.
I had to do the whole mission again and talk to the printing press twice (for no reason) to fix it. Yenna in my camp also never cooked for me.
Larian announcing their next game to be even bigger than before makes me a bit cautious. I hope they don’t bite off more than they can chew.
I think with CDPR people had conveniently forgotten how much of a broken, buggy mess Witcher 3 was at release tbh. It wasn’t as broken as Cyberpunk but I think that it was also easily forgotten because people weren’t remotely as hyped for the game when it came out. CDPR actually has always had a track record of putting out really buggy games that get patched into great ones later.
Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related
I played the first release when it came out. There were a LOT of mission-breaking bugs, missing content, much less customization options, entirely missing features, a really messy perk system etc. It feels like a very different game now, since they patched in more content that was initially missing.
They should’ve pushed back the game at least for another year. 1.0 mostly focused on the cutscenes and Johnny Silverhand/Keanu Reeves since that’s what sold the game initially and left a lot to be desired in other areas.
If I remember correctly, you couldn’t even skip the first training mission. You also had to combine clothes that looked like ass because the armor rating was tied to them and there was no cosmetics system (that came with 2.0).
As with most games I’m just not going to get it day one and wait for the reviews. It’s not like they’re going to run out of stock so there’s no harm in delaying things.
I want to see what they do with the RP side of things, as there are rumours of a proper RP mode, which would make online play actually bearable. But since it’s just rumours with no evidence, I’m going to wait.
I had a ton of fun with the GTA V single player campaign, years ago.
I’ll wait for the reviews, and probably for the price to drop, but if it’s not all multiplayer micro transaction hell I’ll absolutely play the biggest game of the decade.
I dont really think this is an actual problem. Yes, theres a lot of games now, far more than ever before and more releasing in a year than some consoles had in their lifetime. But this is actually a good thing because it means this industry is more accessible than ever and we have very little limit on what experiences we can have.
The actual problem is the diversity and quality of those games due to muddy motivations. Like any entertainment industry under capitalism, artists are not just performing their art because it is their passion, its also to make a living. At the start, the core motivation is passion, a desire to create and innovate and expand on what that medium can be. When that medium reaches a point where a newbie with great talent can become an overnight sensation, then the motivations for creating art in that field become tainted because individuals start to believe that they dont need passion for the art in order to make massive amounts of money. The market will start being flooded with greedy, talentless people who are looking to cash in on the craze.
Ive been gaming since Sega Genesis, and have followed the industry closely most of my life. To this day, I believe everything in modern gaming can be connected back to the insane popularity of Call of Duty 4. Before that game, nearly every game that came out was trying to do something unique. They might share a genre, but they always did something to stand out from the crowd. Very few games were ripping off a competitor, and the ones that did normally did it so poorly that they immediately got ignored. But after the success of CoD4, that changed massively. Everyone was releasing a first person shooter with pvp multiplayer. Games that didnt need multiplayer had it tacked on per publisher demand. Japan went full on stupid and stopped making games that had that particular vibe that only Japanese games had, and even went as far as hiring western studios to redo franchises that absolutely did not need to be redone, with Capcom coming to mind as particularly bad about this. The market was flooded with low quality, cheaply made games trying to get a part of that bag that CoD4 made.
But we actually got lucky during all of this. Xbox and Steam were both platforms that attempted to lift up independent developers. Unlike the film industry, a space was created for low budget game development, and tools to make games were permitted to be accessible for very cheap. What this did was allow those artists who actually have passion in their art be able to take a pathway to creating high quality games. The ripples of that are felt to this very day, with Silksong being a perfect example of why accessibility in a medium is important.
There are a lot of games, and a lot of them suck for sure. A lot of them are rip offs, overpriced re-releases, clones, and even scams. But with that we’ve also gained so many great games, in so many genres, with new genres being molded like every month. The AAA space is arguably in a state of painful saturation, where budgets are bloated, dev times are too long, quality is poor, and prices are absurd. This will end up in whiplash against the AAA scene in time, probably sooner than later. But unlike when a similar phase happened in the Atari era, almost killing the games industry, that just wont happen this time, because the industry is not reliant on giant corpos to carry it.
What i would recommend as a gamer is to give up on the old notion that you can play all the games that come out. Especially as you get older, you wont have the time and you shouldny try to make the time for all of that. Treat games like people treat music. You cant listen to all of the music, and you shouldn’t try to. You find the type of music you like, and search that space to find more things to enjoy. Do the same with games. Dont rush through them, play them at a pace that is fun for you and lets you soak them in, and play the games that specifically appeal to you. Even if its a single game you play on repeat, if it brings you joy then it shouldnt matter.
A more controversial recommendation is stop being averse to spoilers. If your friend plays a game that you dont know if you will ever bother to play, let that friend tell you about the game. Studies have actually shown that players enjoy a game more when they go in knowing spoilers. This might not apply to all games, but from personal experience I can say letting a friend ramble about a game they love that I only have a mild interest in has not only caused me to actually play those games, but games are so rich in detail and varying experiences that I will end up having a very different experience than them that I now get to share with them. Being less averse to spoilers both helps you be able to communicate with more people about gaming, as well as gain new insight on games you might be on the fence about. This can help reduce the amount of games you feel an urge to play but cant make time for by acting as a social filter, or “word of mouth”.
Competition is what degrades quality. People who’s needs are met are more creative and more likely to take risks and more likely to try to make something unique. That’s the problem with the influx of games. You see it in everything. People who are already insulated with a secure amount of wealth are able to become creative musicians/artists and others will just try to copy what makes money, but ultimately most will fail due to the sheer amount of people competing. If every developer and creator’s needs were met before they tried creating anything then the landscape would look very different, but that’s not the world we live in.
The market is extremely competitive, and ever more so with each new developer. Everything is more accesssible yes, but that is worse for everyone besides major IPs who will always make money and those who can take risks because they are in a position to do so. This is the problem with all creative fields. It’s great for people who are already secure and terrible for everyone else.
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