The whole Embracer situation is so weird to me. I hadn’t heard about them until the news broke that they were buying some of the Tolkien licenses and had already been buying a whole bunch of game studios. Cut to a couple months later and Embracer can’t get rid off all these studios fast enough apparently bleeding money left and right.
Where did they suddenly come from? Or was I just out of the loop on them?
Can’t remember the exact details, but I think it was something along the lines of them acquiring all these ips with loaned money, banking on a big merger that eventually fell through.
Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.
It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.
Thank you for the great comment, that was super informative. I didn’t know Nordic Games became Embracer. That explains it a bit why I thought they came out of nowhere.
Those are usually locked away behind command lines and they don’t test with random chance or such. You trigger the things directly. Realistically what probably happened is some engineer wrote the system slightly wrong and no one caught it. Possibly maybe a designer requested the romance to be more prominent and the solution on engineering side was to tweak a value. It’s be surprised if anyone changes hard coded values for QA. It’s not the 90s anymore where qa is the engineering team.
Honestly, I'd completely forgotten that Embracer had bought out Gearbox. Curious to see who ends up acquiring them, if anyone actually does. Also have to wonder just how many studios Embracer is going to end up selling off or shutting down by the end of this.
I do not know a single person IRL who has purchased this game (across multiple platforms). We all played and love to this day, Skyrim, FO3, FO:NV (my friends like FO4, it wasn’t for me personally, I found the story incredibly boring…the dogshit performance on release also never helped). So I am wondering what their gamepass numbers are vs. full purchases. Steam (the numbers cited in the article) would be purchases, but I would be interested one day to see the split of gamepass to purchase users
I'd bet a sizable portion of steam numbers aren't purchases either. AMD was running the promo such that anyone buying AMD hardware from like July onwards got a free copy.
Actually a very fair point, and something that I do in fact find interesting is that it hasn’t breached FO4’s numbers. That game burned me so fucking hard lol. I bought that pile of shit at full price (last game I ever purchased at launch), and it ran SOOOOOO bad. Like less than 20 fps in any city bad. I tried to push through the framerate/bugs to get to the good and for me it just never came. I dropped that game after 1 playthrough and I have 0 desire at all to ever pick it up again. I have replayed skyrim (heavily modded at this point) and FO:NV (FO3 didnt work right on my W10 machine, i wonder if it works now with W11 and compatibility mode. I would replay that for sure), but I think with FO4 the charm had worn off. Playing a game that felt like oblivion [Not in a literal sense, but in the “its a bethesda RPG” sense] (with shitty quest writing) in the modern day at sub 20 fps for the price of $60 was one hell of a wakeup call.
So all of that is to say, I find it surprising that their new flagship has not beaten FO4’s numbers. Perhaps they burned a lot more people than just me?
I'm playing Starfield on gamepass. Fallout 4 was similarly a wakeup call for me: I had pre-ordered it and was mostly disappointed by it. I occasionally try replaying it, but that disappointment sticks with me to this day. This is coming from someone whose first major gaming experience on PC was with Oblivion (which I still play to-date).
So yeah - I'm with you on not buying Starfield new because of FO4's poor showing. I am enjoying it well enough that I may buy it someday (kinda wish I had gotten a GPU bundle including it just because I've been ready to upgrade for a long time), but I'm not in any rush to do so. I just knew I wasn't going to be as interested in it as I was with other Bethesda games of the past.
As an aside, I hope FO3 works better for you these days. A year or two back, Bethesda patched the Steam version to remove the Games for Windows Live requirement, which had foiled many attempted replays of mine (particularly when I made the move to Linux). Now it runs perfectly well.
I wonder how long this takes people. Couple of hours? All day? Customizing characters in game for me is a tedious task. I usually just pick a preset most of the time so I can start playing.
Most games you don’t even see the character model (Diablo 3)
My problem right now is I created my character and am very happy with them in character creator, but when I look at him in game I’m unhappy. I’ve even paid to tweak him a bit and it’s better but I’m still not happy.
I’m like 90% sure that the character creator has lighting features enabled that are normally disabled for performance reasons, which is why it’s much easier to look good in the character creator than it is in the game.
If I’m right, maybe modders can “fix” it (although it will probably tank performance).
Doesn’t need to tank performance. Instead of turning on the lighting elsewhere, they could turn it off in character creation so you can see what it’ll actually look like.
The extra shaders are also applied to NPCs when you talk to them. But there’s never really a way to see the player’s face with these features outside the character creator.
I haven’t heard anything about this until now, but I loved the Monkey Island games. I started with Monkey Island 3 because I was too young to be aware of the other two. I didn’t like the fourth one much because they changed the style a lot. I think DoubleFine did made a few Monkey Island games after, but I haven’t played those.
The Lucas Arts games of this era were amazing, so let’s see if this will live up to them, since it seems to be aiming for that. Full Throttle was sick, and I would love if somehow Full Throttle 2 were to still happen. Insert skeleton “still waiting” meme.
Tell tale made one and Sony help fund remasters of 1 and 2. Double fine wasn’t involved other than being founded by Tim Schafer whom worked in them before leaving Lucas arts.
The new one was independent with all the old crew except Tim Schafer
My hope is that people leave and make a new studio and some new IP’s. These large publishers buying everything and then running into the ground due to endess growth is tiring.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne