For the GTA delay, if it is so they can release a less bug filled finished product instead of the usual AAA strategy as of late of throwing whatever out and maybe kinda patching it later on, then good on them for doing it how it should be done. I probably won’t buy it either way since I haven’t cared for the tone of any of the GTA games since San Andreas personally, but for the people that will it is a good thing.
As for the price of games in general. I’m not opposed to theoretically paying $80, or even more, for a game I deem worth that kind of money. Never have been. The issue is 99% of the time the games in question aren’t worth that kind of money. As an example, I am a Hitman fan. Over the course of the varies releases since 2016 to what is now just called Hitman: World of Assassination, I have spent well over $100 for maps and content. And I don’t regret it because the end result is a huge game that I have gotten untold hours of enjoyment out of over the last ~9 years.
The AAA players have simply started to price themselves out of their own market, and smaller players have started to fill the void they left behind.
They sell the hardware at a loss and initial adopters are more likely to be able to find an exploit that allows the console to play pirated games. If a Lite comes out early enough, there's hope that it might be exploitable.
It's my understanding that the Steam Deck is not performant when it comes to running Switch games via Yuzu/Ryujinx so it would probably be even worse with Switch 2 games, which are probably more taxing to emulate.
All that said, I have a Switch Lite that I share with my wife and I like it. There are so many companies you're "not allowed" to buy from according to Lemmy lol, I don't have the time for that. Almost all publishers are ass, should I never buy a game again?
Edit: As pointed out, Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.
I knew a dude who worked at Activision Blizzard and his description of his workplace sounded horrid. The weird part was his fawning bright eyed love for the office culture. He viewed it as a perfect dream workplace. I don’t even know it there’s a takeaway from all that. It just always struck me as notably odd
They have plenty of leverage. WoW runs on centralized servers which cannot maintain themselves, and are likely still under constant forms of Cyberattack, waiting for a serious vulnerability.
Gamestop has been a meme stock since covid when it jumped from a few dollars a share to $50 a share. Since 2020 it has fluctuated quite a bit but has overall trended downwards. Now it’s gone from $10 up to $30 each. A fool and his money are soon parted.
Welp, reckon it’s time I take my happy ass down to the local used game store and sell my Xbox. Thing’s collecting dust anyway. I think I’ll get a new camera lens instead.
What’s the matter? I thought they were super confident this was going to do really well. Are they getting cold feet and deciding to make changes for fear of bad reception when they don’t quite have enough time, leading to forced overtime?
EDIT: Wait. All of this was for a DEMO? How bad was the game that they needed to work 60 hours a week mandatory overtime just to finish a demo of the game??
Demo in this context isn’t a consumer-playable ‘demo’ in the sense that most people understand; it means a playable internal build with specific targets for what must be included. Internal demo milestones are often linked to project funding and approval to move forwards, so there is a tangible risk if they fail to deliver.
Presumably the current state of the game is behind where it needed to be to deliver that demo, so they’re now crunching to finish it on time.
IMO, any time a game repeatedly fails to meet deadlines, especially so early on in its development, that usually indicates the game isn’t likely to launch in a healthy state. Either the scope is way too big, or the narrative is receiving major changes and reworks, or the people working on the game just wish they weren’t working on that project and taking longer as a result. This kind of situation is rarely good, and even more rarely ends up with a good launched product.
Cyberpunk 2077, Anthem, Mass Effect Andromeda, Halo Infinite, Duke Nukem Forever, John Romero’s Daikatana (although I personally am a bit charmed by this one despite it being undoubtedly bad), and other games are examples of this. Repeated failure to meet production deadlines, lots of crunch forced on the developers, and all for what? The launch product for all of these games was horrendously bad. Some for technical reasons, some for narrative reasons, and some for both.
When I first saw the trailer for Intergalactic, I had mixed feelings. I liked the intended graphics/art style and retro styled tech, the Porsche was a little weird product placement but fine I guess, but the characters and dialogue I personally found both unappealing. The obvious Snake Plissken rip-off woman the main character talked to (blonde with an eyepatch, I can only assume she is some sort of merc job handler) seemed maybe interesting but then she spoke and the writing lost my interest. Upon learning the game is likely to follow some sort of religious theming, I lost all interest in the game. Its not what I want from a video game. So this was pretty disappointing to learn. But now seeing the game is in such a state doesn’t give me great confidence that the final product will be even decent when it launches.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad take, but it’s worth pointing out that lots of games miss internal deadlines and waste time ‘spinning their wheels’ but still turn out good or even great. The difference is that you don’t usually hear about it, whereas here some of the team are obviously pissed enough about the crunch that they went to the press.
Crunch is always bad and is an indication of poor project management and/or unrealistic expectations, but issues with scope or major reworks aren’t always a death knell either. I’ve seen plenty of games go through that and come out the other side better than before.
Of course there are always exceptions, but I don’t count on news like this to mean that this project will be the exception.
Metroid Prime and Halo 2 both had excessive crunch and both turned out great, obviously. In Metroid Prime’s case, a management change seemed to fix it in the long term. In Halo’s case, Bungie just embraced the suck I guess, since they still wanted to make Halo 3.
Regardless, these were exceptions to the rule, and I would never expect a project to be an exception, personally.
I don’t think it was a slog, but I do find DND 5e an unsatisfying system. You spend a long time waiting to get to the cool parts of your character, and unlimited resting breaks dnd’s already dubious balance.
I tried a Pathfinder mod, but it wasn’t quite doing it for me. I’m not sure what would do it for me exactly. I’m being a stereotypical customer where I don’t know what I want, but I can tell you what I don’t like, heh.
There’s a single mod that purports to convert the game to pathfinder 2e. I’m not sure if the balance isn’t to my taste or if I was doing something wrong, but my characters all had very low hit chances on their first attack. Missing isn’t fun for me
The story was excellent, the combat was a slog. Still finished it and overall enjoyed it, but it felt like they were being limited by the DnD system a lot, ultimately worsening the experience.
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