You know. I have never once heard a single company admit that they are just gonna release some mediocre pos product. They all say the next thing will be the best thing since sliced bread. Not saying I doubt them. But a company will never be like “we gonna phone it in and release an at best 36% complete product.”
They do say it sometimes, like Microsoft admitting defeat on this year’s Call of Duty. It’s not, “We’re going to release a mediocre product,” but when they say, “We hear you, and we’re making changes” or “we’ve made the difficult decision to…” or “we’re trying to stay agile”, that’s usually what it means. Beyond just hyping up their next product, there’s substantive information in here, like engine upgrades, expansion of the studio, reduction in production timelines, the damn genre of the video game (because that wasn’t a foregone conclusion given this series), etc.
Larian is very ambitious in their aims. Divinity: OS, DOS2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 were all huge games with incredible interactions and stories, and the games hold together even if you intentionally make an effort to break them by being a murder hobo or just not playing “correctly.” Their games are pretty awesome, because there is no “correct” way to play them, they’re very wide open and flexible.
I don’t always like everything they do (in fact, I kinda hate BG3), but I respect their efforts. They don’t half-ass anything.
It’s like Apple every year who proudly boasts on stage that they just made the best iPhone ever. Yeah no shit, that’s what they are supposed to do each year.
It does make sense, because “choice paralysis” is a thing that exists. So instead of choosing the game you want and playing it, you might spend more time looking for games to play than actually playing them.
I’ve been addicted to Bioshock for so many years now. I do a yearly-ish replay of them (Infinite is my fav, which some consider sacrilege) and always hoped for more. They’re perfect Steam Deck games.
For now, I think the upcoming Judas will be a more dependable game to look forward to:
A disintegrating starship. A desperate escape plan.
You are the mysterious and troubled Judas. Your only hope for survival is to make or break alliances with your worst enemies. Will you work together to fix what you broke – or will you leave it to burn?
Judas is a narrative FPS developed by Ghost Story Games, a studio led by Ken Levine, Creative Director of System Shock 2, BioShock, and BioShock Infinite.
Throw the System Shock remakes into your replay. They’re Bioshock in all but name, except you get more freedom (that decreases steadily over time with each game in this “series”).
$200M ain’t no pocket change. One would hope such high-profile failures as this or Avengers would curb execs enthusiasm for live service games, but I’m not holding my breath.
The article even cites all of the similar flops prior to Suicide Squad not deterring leadership on their plan for Suicide Squad. Someone else out there is still making that same mistake. Like Bungie with Marathon, for example.
Sucks for the low level employees losing their jobs, but I can’t possibly feel bad about Epic losing money. Garbage company that needs to lose their grip on the industry after the shit they pulled with Epic Game Store and buying up games/studios just to delist their games from Steam, axe the Linux support, and make them exclusives on the worst platform in gaming.
Of course the companies pin the graphics as a culprit. Otherwise they would have to admit the mismanagement is the reason they burn through millions of dollars. Mismanagement brings with it another aspect the author did not mention: stress and burnout. Either working too hard, or spinning wheels doing nothing is pure poison to a creative person. Constant direction changes, lack of clear communication, never knowing whether you did well or are on the verge of being laid off - all these make people work harder but output less/worse quality assets.
Wow, this guy has serious punchable face energy. It’s not even that interesting, the leakers he catches (or at least the only ones he talks about) are really dumb (one is a child who data mined!).
yep, ‘tis the way of the ceo. being so delightfully out of touch that you make the shittiest decisions possible just for your quarterly profits to be marginally higher
In general, he made decisions to attempt to buy the market rather than have the best services/console.
I'm not sure if MS is going to go the good route, but they have said that their acquisitions won't be console exclusives. I've understood that consoles lose money. Selling games is where you make it. Why limit your games to a single console? We're unlikely to see incredible dominance of a console in the future. You'd just be limiting your consumer base
MS has indicated that they will honor contracts and some promises were made to get their acquisitions through.
But everything has either been vague or outright said will be console exclusive. Bethesda is the earliest example of this, and we’ll probably see more later.
PS mostly makes their console exclusives in house. Even Spider-Man (the prime example people point to) was always intended to be console exclusive by Marvel and is only as good as it is because of Playstation funding.
The point of first party exclusives is to make money from your store long term. If they make their first party titles available on other platforms, fewer people would buy a PlayStation, which means less long term royalties from store sales.
So you limit the customer base for your first party titles, but ideally you make a ton more on your store fees. That’s the same reason Valve makes first party titles, to get people on Steam, not to make money from game sales.
What they should do is make a handheld that can play PS4 titles. That attracts a different demographic and keeps control of the store royalties. But they really need to make sure it works well, since it’ll be competing with the Switch and Steam Deck (and similar handheld PCs).
Uncharted 2, from Sony Group Corp’s Naughty Dog, was released in 2009 and had a budget of $20 million. The studio’s latest game, The Last of Us: Part 2, cost more than $200 million.
So, uh…why can’t we do that anymore? Even if you account for salary increases and avoiding crunch and such, $40M-$50M for a game as good as Uncharted 2 sounds great!
Because graphics still sell games. You can do simplified graphics like Nintendo and still sell games, but lots of people want the photo realistic experience and the bar for that has gone way way up incrementally over the years.
I think we’re seeing that that’s no longer true. Minecraft is the best-selling game ever, for instance. If you want to build the photo realistic experience, maybe aim for a smaller scope of video game, like the more linear action games we used to get, because otherwise, the industry ends up in the state it’s in.
Yeah, maybe I’m just wrong in general … The above doesn’t look that different from say black ops 6 footage.
I definitely wish for a return to the linear format (or simi linear where there are a few concurrent linear quests going on). I think straight up open world just lends itself to making a lot of walking simulators.
Halo Infinity was one of the most boring games I ever played between the weapons sounding like toys and the spread out objectives with no clear central mission.
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong on this. Part of the problem is new IPs are risky, and I’m sure market research is telling the big publishers that you’d better not suddenly downgrade your graphics on an established property. Nintendo’s very comfortable in this space because they haven’t really gone this route with first party. They’ve even managed to thread the needle on Mario, Metroid, and Zelda by having both 2D and 3D offerings.
Nintendo is in a very envious spot in general. Hell, I think Nintendo makes some great games, I just wish they wouldn’t force me to buy yet another computer solely for the purpose of playing their games. I haven’t owned a Mario Kart or Zelda game in years but I’d love to play if I could do so on PC/Linux.
Uncharted and Last of Us are first party Sony games. If they were to say that a game can still be enjoyable without cutting edge graphics no one would want to buy the latest PlayStation iteration.
I think they’re already running out of people who want to buy the latest PlayStation, and Sony clearly can’t afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars after this level of graphics anymore, because it’s not resulting in equivalent growth of console sales to make up for it.
I am a pc gamer and I have the latest-ish video card. I got an expensive card so that I can play any game, but really don’t consider graphics much anymore. You are correct, some people still chase that aspect of video gaming. I think if you have been around for a while, that desire fades. I have lots of low res games these days.
Also a PC gamer and I’ve discovered as I’ve aged, CPU has been more of a bottleneck for me than GPU. Games like Factorio or Path of Exile need a powerful CPU, but their graphics are secondary at best.
Same here. My favorite game is Kerbal Space Program, and the graphics look like they are straight out of the early 2000s, but even with a 12 core CPU I still get crazy lag during explosions, staging, and other physics interactions. Transitioning from "on rails" flight to actually modelling physics when within a few km of something else has also not ever been smooth.
There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.
Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.
Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.
They likely had some outlandish request or policy that was anathema to the department’s mission, and just assumed that they would cave. Seems like good leadership stuck to their principles, and the good leaders were followed by teams who weren’t willing to lose that.
If the owner is smart, they’ll backtrack, make concessions when hiring everyone back, and learn from their fuckup. In reality, I hope the new company that forms from the exodus finds fast success.
The overabundance of games is killing great games.
Can’t tell you how many fantastic multiplayer games I’ve bought only to find out they’re ghost towns or become ghost towns soon after purchasing. And it’s because players are so spread out over so many games. 20 years ago these games would have been major successes with a huge player base for years, but they’re dead on arrival or within a few months. It’s a real bummer.
That being said, I’m going to plug Mycopunk. Just got it and it’s great. Like Deep Rock Galactic and Risk of Rain 2 had a baby. We need more players though. Came out in July. Currently on sale. But base price is cheap.
Multiplayer games 20 years ago were also built to be more scalable to different numbers of players, and they mostly had bots and such, too. I might push back on how long they sustained huge player bases though. Those games were often sequeled very quickly, and most of the players would move to the next one, leaving behind a small percentage. At least the old game was always still playable for those who bought it, though.
There are multiplayer games from 30 years ago that still have 30 people who play on the first Friday night of each month, and they will put that in their calendar and keep the game alive.
The idea that multiplayer games need huge communities of players otherwise they are “dead” is what is killing multiplayer games.
I mean I get what you’re saying. I’ve been playing Sven-Coop for 26 years and counting. People are still playing. People are still making new levels for it.
But it’s mostly people on the older side and it’s because it was a mod for a HUGELY popular game and the mod itself used to have a ton of players.
But a lot of these new, good games never get that big following that allow for a small fan base decades later. Or even months later. Because there’s so many other options spreading gamers out.
Active enough that I can queue at any time of day and find opponents close to my skill level with good ping
Active enough that I can queue at peak hours and find opponents
Need to schedule games via Discord matchmaking
If I really love the game enough, I'll put up with jumping through hoops to play it, but it does get frustrating when the games I like are a lot more convenient to play than the games I love.
It’s great. It’s early access, so it needs some polishing, but it’s already pretty solid. It can be a little overwhelming at first, so make sure you’re doing one of the easier difficulties. Get your weapons and character leveled up and it starts becoming more engaging. Try out different weapons too. I was struggling until I started branching out. And keep in mind that the enemies are made up of various parts and you can blow those parts off and then other enemies can pick those parts up and use them. So learning how to take off limbs and then make sure the limbs are destroyed so they can’t be re-used is important.
Oh, and it allows gifs in the in-game chat. Something I’ve never seen in a game before. Type “/gif” followed by any keyword and it tosses an appropriate gif into the chat. It’s a lot of fun to mess around with.
Love it so far. My only complaint is that I’ve accidentals melted several mods I wanted to keep because I forget which key does what. Wish there was an unlock button and trash you could drag to instead of just two keys. Other than that its great.
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