Given the botched launch, this isn’t much of a surprise. Only thing I can say is that I hope it serves as a lesson to people with the mindset of “this game’ll be great ^in 5 years^”
In which case, I’ll clarify that I meant the people who bought, found it was borked then chose to wait for updates instead of getting an easily deserved refund.
I said this at launch, you cannot do early access with an established IP. The agreement is a reduced price because you’re paying to get in on the ground floor before it actually gets good. But for an established IP you’ve already built your audience, so most people are going to buy on day 1 at the reduced price, so the “reduced price” has to basically be full price. Now you’re paying full price for an unfinished game because Take Two pushed them to release an unfinished game that had been delayed by years.
Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn’t play them, myself included.
I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.
IMO the user interface/controls/gameplay of BG1 just feels so dated compared to modern games. If you didn’t play it back in the day and have that extra nostalgia bonus when you go to play it now, you may just find yourself thinking the game is super clunky and wondering what all the hype was about.
That being said, the story is second to none, and the story of BG2 is arguably as good or better. So if you don’t mind the somewhat-dated play style and want a good story, they could be right up your alley.
Hmm I used to play old point and click Sierra games, so the interface can’t be worse than those I’m assuming. The question is do I have the patience now to figure it out lol
Some parts of the interface are actually pretty similar to the old Kings Quest/Quest for Glory games lol. For instance you still cycle through the cursor with a right click to look, talk, walk, and left left click to use the action shown by the cursor etc. The combat is substantially different, and sort of like KoTOR you can pause during combat and plan the next moves for all your party members. It also helps to have at least some understanding of AD&D’s combat system, THAC0 in particular, as that is what the combat is based on.
But yeah if you’ve been gaming long enough that you remember the golden age of Sierra games then you will probably be able to appreciate BG1 and 2
I haven’t played BG1 or 2. As I understand it, the only connection between the games is a couple of cameo characters. The main plot and characters of BG3 are completely original and independent.
However, it would be helpful to have some experience playing DnD and/or some vague knowledge of DnD lore.
Damn, I really hope this isn’t true. I just started playing (even though my PC is below spec and I have to run it at potato quality) and I was having fun with the improvements over the original. I’ve followed the development and yeah initial launch was way premature but the 0.2 For Science! update looked to have turned things around.
But staff departure postings on LinkedIn are a very bad sign…
Wow - Take Two shuttering this studio AND Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) just a month after they announced they’re buying Gearbox for almost half a billion. Absolutely catastrophic mismanagement. What a shitshow.
Extremely disappointed. They had some very passionate people on the project and I was hoping that they’ll turn things around over the next several years.
A message from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, posted this morning to social media platform X, confirms we’ll hear of Switch 2 “this fiscal year” - before the end of March 2025.
But the message also damps down any expectation we’ll hear about Switch 2 in the next few months - as Furukawa rules out any further details being shared in an upcoming Nintendo Direct scheduled for June.
Furukawa wrote. "We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015.
“We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.”
That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone now. They could likely grab a bunch of sales by coming out with a higher-powered system alongside a cheaper version, because many people would like to play games at higher than 25 fps.
And yet it was one of the best gaming experiences ever, no matter the framerate and resolution.
Been a long time since fidelity was interesting to notice, tbh. Don’t get me wrong, all else being equal I’d take 165Hz and 4k over 24Hz and 720p. But all else isn’t equal. And the better game easily wins.
Felt like it was doing just fine to me for how advanced the systems were on a console that was six years old. I do wish you were able to play it, it's an awesome game, it indeed has ambitions that surpass the hardware, but I do think they managed to pull it off, if only by the skin of their teeth.
While I disagree that the game was unplayable, I first played the game emulated at 4K@60K with AutoHDR (surprisingly decent) and it’s almost criminal how poor it looks on native hardware by comparison. The game scales really well.
Maybe with a new Nvidia kit we’ll get DLSS and Frame Gen. And I expect ToTK to get a new port.
I read all the time that TotK has terrible performance, but i never noticed in all the time I played it. I guess growing up playing on old pc hardware made me tolerate shitty framerates.
I fucking care when I only play docked and games like xenoblade chronicles 3 fucking lag in places. The switch is used least for me between an s, ps5 and a midrange pc despite it having “fun games”
Can also confirm excessive lag with XC3. Also, when jumping into the depths in TotK, game would freeze off and on. These Nintendo apologists are wild. The Switch was utilizing outdated hardware when it dropped. I’ll be impressed if the Switch 2 has at least PS4 level hardware.
Keep in mind, underpowered hardware means lower price, which means more sales. It worked with the Wii, it worked with the Switch. I fully expect people to bitch about the Switch2 being underpowered, using “ancient” stuff from 2020-21
“Lateral thinking with withered technology.” Nintendo gave up on competing technologically with its competitors after the GameCube, and it proved to be a good decision.
How is that tradition? It happened one time. Successor name suffixes and prefixes used: super, color, advance, mini, 64, i, 3, new, u. It could be anything.
Edit: ah no, there was also super game boy, I guess that’s the only one they repeated. But that was specifically for super NES compatibility.
Do “i”, “mini” and “new” really count as new consoles? i and new were just upgrades to the same console, I believe, and I’m not sure what “Mini” was even for…
I mean, they were direct successors. I imagine the next console won’t be something completely different than the switch, so I imagine I will be some sort of switch 2.
How about the Swiitch? You get the roman numeral 2 in there and the name’s similar enough to the original Switch, so customers will be confused as to whether this is a new console or an iteration of the current one. Just like the Wii U!
I think Nintendo is dancing into dangerous territory here. I have a feeling this thing is going to be loaded with anti-features here specifically designed to curtail modding, piracy, and even unlicensed peripherals. The games themselves are going to get HD re-re-eleases and Nintendo will charge you full price again for the moderate upgrade.
Maybe they’ll actually upgrade the hardware to be half decent on this thing, if they want to discourage piracy, make better shit. If I want to play any switch games currently, I’ll just pirate them and play it on the steam deck.
It is! You can go to the Steam store > New & Noteworthy > Most Played to see current player counts for the top 100 games. Hades II is currently #6, ahead of Helldivers even!
I’ll never understand people jumping to play unfinished games. There’s no way most of those 100k people are actually going to participate in the ea feedback / qa process, so all they’re achieving by playing early is spoiling the game for themselves with an inferior version. It’s not like this is made by an inexperienced studio that might keep it in ea indefinitely neither, you literally just need to wait a year to play it when it’s released. /r
The first game was amazing. This one really doesn’t feel unfinished as-is though. There’s likely to be tons of balance changes, and I’m sure there will be bug fixes and more performance optimization updates to come… It’s still super fun, why wait
When I was younger and had more time to not worry about merely existing, I used to enjoy chasing the updates and trying to find every glitch and exploit and do as much silly shit as possible before patches went live.
Guess the first one was even worse than this one at this stage of development, but nobody knew about the game yet. I’m still waiting for the finished product (as I did with the first one), I don’t want to spoil me.
Some art will probably be replaced too. I remember Charon in the original hades had his generic robed character portrait replaced with a better one. Zagreus even complimented him on his new look when it was added to the game, which was a nice touch.
Yes, it’s unfinished, but my experience with the original Hades is that Supergiant knows how to make sure their product is at a certain level of polish before making EA available. I haven’t played much, but they seemed to hit the mark again.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree. The first game is one of my most played on Steam and I was invited to the technical test for the second. But I probably won’t be buying it any time soon. I absolutely hate the trend of buying unfinished products. While this developer is most likely not taking advantage, so many others do. Why should we pay money to beta test your game???
I’ve purchased a fair number of early access games from indie developers.
For me the benefit is that it’s often cheaper during EA, so I get it at a discount, and it already feels like a complete game worth the price I’m paying. I know they are actively working on adding more to it, and having more things added to the game for me to explore extends its lifespan for me. So I get more enjoyment out of it than I would waiting for 1.0, at a cheaper price.
For small developers it gives them the funds to continue development, and feedback that helps with game balance.
Because they get to play it early. That’s it. I played BG3 early and still had a lot of fun replaying Act 1 when it came out.
The studio gets a number of things, as well. While direct feedback is small, that is still valuable as they could never test that many hardware and software variants. They also get automated data from the software phoning home on crashes if that’s enabled. And they get an influx of cash in the last few months of development as their sales spike gets a bit flattened. It’s a winning strategy if you don’t have the funds for a huge marketing blitz to drive initial sales.
I understand the sentiment and I generally agree with you but I think I can make a case for Hades as an exception.
I picked up the first one in ea because I was thirsty for a new roguelike and some friends raved about it enough to me, and it was already a great game. The changes that came over the period I played were additive in the sense that they just opened more options in a game that already felt complete to me (mostly anyways, but more on that in a sec). But to defend it I can’t just say “oh well it felt like a finished game” there also needs to be a tangible benefit to playing it in early access. And there was! The early access versions of the game included meta banter between the narrator and Zagreus, little jokes about new things appearing or things that should be there but aren’t, references to the fact that pieces of the story’s scaffold were still being set up. It sounds small but it was just more of the wonderful character charm that oozes from every corner of that game and I actually kind of missed it a little bit once the full release came. Anyways I haven’t picked up Hades 2 yet (been making more of an effort to clear my backlog lately), but I’m thinking about it. And as far as the ostensible “point” of early access—community feedback and income to support development—Supergiant has given me ample reason to trust that they’ll make it worth it for me as a player if I don’t want to wait for the polished final product.
A Supergiant game in Early Access is more finished than most fully-released triple-A titles.
Plus, as with the first Hades, they work the continued development into the narrative of the game.
What made you think I want people to quit having fun? If anything it would be more fun to play once it’s finished, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of games to play in the meanwhile.
Edit: I just want people to give more thought into the games they play than “whatever’s on top of steam today”. Just because it became available now doesn’t mean you have to play it right away.
I understand your point but you can also be satisfied with an early access game for what it had when you played regardless of later improvements. Valheim is a great example of this: you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that wasn’t satisfied with it, despite being unfinished.
There’s no way most of those 100k people are actually going to participate in the ea feedback / qa process
On first launch it asks if you’re willing to have your play data submitted. So even if people don’t actively send feedback they are still providing data about what systems/weapons/upgrades they engage with more or less, how successful their run is with any given weapon or upgrade, how frequently they win or lose in a given fight, etc.
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