It's in the top ten most played games on Steam and had sold at least 5 million; even that number is two months old and doesn't include PlayStation. If I were to wager a guess, which you can often extrapolate from the number of reviews on Steam, it's much closer to 10 million, which is how many copies a typical Assassin's Creed or FIFA game will sell. Baldur's Gate 3 is mainstream.
Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I’m curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.
I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren’t already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren’t really tutorialized well, etc.
I had no understanding of 5e, and there were a couple of things I didn't understand, but so much of that game, especially at the beginning, is choosing an option with a high chance of success and shoving or throwing things that most games wouldn't let you shove or throw. The way the game lets you verb any feasible noun, coupled with higher production value, is probably why this one hit. It's going to continue to make other RPGs with even higher budgets stand out as dinosaurs; not just Starfield but especially BioWare's next couple of efforts, given their Baldur's Gate lineage.
It's because people aren't idiots like developers have thought for years. People don't mind a game where you need to read and learn as long as there is a payoff for reading and learning. We have been paying the price for devs thinking everyone is braindead for over a decade now as more and more mechanics and features are removed to please people who were never going to give the genre a chance anyway. By way of example, Dragon Age II didn't get the Call of Duty audience to play Dragon Age, it just convinced most who liked Dragon Age that EA only accidentally published one of the best RPGs of its decade.
Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.
Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
Before you throw stones be advised that this team is like 5 people at most, the game just blew up and some gamers are giving it the Valheim treatment wanting faster and faster updates.
Such a childish take expecting AAA speed from tiny homebrew dev teams imo. Obviously progress is going to come slower in most instances, they don’t have a tiny island nation’s worth of man power to throw. That and, I’m sorry, if my homebrew passion project blows up stupid big when I go for early access for seed money / water testing, I promise you I will be taking time off to celebrate the accomplishment.
This shit is a grind. Lots of dedication over a long period of time. Go on, hit that resort life for a minute, you earned it. Come back and finish up when you get some r&r. 🤙
Obviously still expecting progress down the line, but if I’m supporting early access I know what I’m getting into. Indie scene is where the love is, but it’s ma & pa shit. Plus there’s thousands of other ways to waste my time, I’ll check back in later if I’m bored with the game’s current build.
Waiting sucks, but chill. Save outrage for where it really matters, like genuinely shitty devs. Juuust my pocket change. 🙌
Calling things in OverWatch style shooter is a bit like calling every first person shooter a Doom clone. Just call it a hero shooter I know what a hero shooter is. You don’t need to compare it to another game.
It’s bad enough that the term a “roguelike” exists, I can guarantee that hardly anyone who plays them has ever actually played rogue, and fair enough since it’s ancient, so they have no idea if the game they’re playing is like it or not.
“Roguelike” has also become very watered down. I see “roguelite” used less often, though it’s more accurate, but there isn’t a good alternative term right now. Turn-based-dungeon-crawler-with-permadeath is historically accurate but there’s a tendency to lump action games like Rogue Legacy and Enter the Gungeon in that needs to be accounted for.
(And no I haven’t played Rogue but I did play a bunch of NetHack)
Based on reviews I’ve read there are some issues but it’s a small dev team (1 man shop iirc) and it’s the best medieval city builder since Banished according to reviews.
Banished is a low bar. It had a lot of issues. I would argue the recently released Farthest Frontier is a better comparison. It also has some flaws but is leaps and bounds better than Banished.
Think you just described colony builders quite accurately. Loved the idea of an ant farm when I was a kid until I put the small ones in instead of the big ones
I bought it last night and only have a few hours in. So far it’s pretty great though. I look forward to seeing it continue to develop, and according to reviews posted by pre-release testers the developer is very open to community feedback.
It’s definitely not a fully complete game yet, but I expect I’ll get at least a couple weekend binges out of it before I shelve it and wait for more content.
Also, it’s working perfectly in Linux (through Proton) so extra points there.
It definitely still feels like it’s in EA. There’s only one map and there are a ton of buttons that do nothing. But the game is aesthetic AF and the core gameplay is solid.
I played some last night going in completely blind. I enjoyed it, but there isn’t really a tutorial, just tooltips that come up periodically. Unfortunately my town died after a few hours because I didn’t understand I was supposed to be preparing food for as soon as possible (crops grow on a year cycle, so you need the seeds in ASAP). Makes logical sense, but the game doesn’t tell you and then I was stuffed.
I think it’s totally fun as a sandbox/run-based game, but if you’re looking for something more you’ll need to wait.
As a noun or adjective it would be a derogatory term for gay men. As a verb most people would recognise it as disappeared in the UK. There plenty of other terms for the verb.
Pretty sure they’re referring to “poof” which is a derogatory term for a gay man in British vernacular. In any case, the context in which it was used clearly wasn’t intended as the derogatory term, rather to mean “suddenly”.
There is legitimate use cases for a zero hour contract. The vast majority don’t fit it.
If the zero hour contract minimum wage was £50 per hour, then it would be appropriate. This would still allow it to be useful to hire consultant, semi- retired experts and contractors and use PAYE, no additional companies, accountants etc. Very efficient and would only apply to employees with some power in the relationship with the business.
However, it’s used to exploit minimum or low wage staff. The company takes all the flexibility it offers and uses it to bully the employee into accepting the hours the business wants. They do this by treating to cut hours if the employee doesn’t agree. This makes it difficult to have multiple jobs to make up the hours.
I mean at least they’re also removing managers at Blizzard and Activision with the layoffs. That it hits workers, too - sadly utterly expected 😑 - but at least MS isn’t above letting useless and redundant managers go.
(edit) Ugh, sorry. I should have added an explicit /s, it’s not as obvious as I thought it’d be. 😔
I'm not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it's probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don't need an entire second company's worth of those departments.
These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it's good to be realistic about why they happened.
So you’re saying that if Microsoft hadn’t hoovered up another company due to being creatively bankrupt, almost two thousand people would still have a job?
What you say is true but if you followed the reports you’ll know they fired the whole of the blizzard survival team, a good chunk of the Overwatch team and writers/story people from WoW. Very much not only the redundancies.
I don’t understand what market the PlayStation Portal was designed for.
You’re basically paying £200 for a DualSense controller MacGyver’d on a tablet screen that can only remote play PS5 games or stream from PSNow. There are both cheaper and better options which support not just Sony’s ecosystem but also other gaming platforms.
Not to mention that cloud gaming in general just sucks.
Cloud gaming doesn’t suck though. As long as you have good Internet, it’s awesome. I have several thousand hours with cloud gaming and couldn’t have played any of those games otherwise, very rarely have any issues.
Same here og 2020 stadia user here although I wouldn’t necessarily call cloud gaming ideal
pc gaming is the way to go nowadays with Cheap games on steam and free games on epic games sometimes on gog plus playing online is free and nowadays you can build yourself a very cheap rx 480/570 miners are trying get rid of there stock i5 4450/i7 3770 pc for very cheaply pair that with a 60gb ssd and above for a boot drive and a 1tb hdd and your gaming
Cloud gaming doesn’t suck. You can literally play Half Life Alyx on a Quest from a cloud PC and it works great. This all depends on your location and cloud pc of course.
I absolutely don’t get why Bethesda sold Starfield as a “new generation rpg”. It’s nothing but an archaic game with old mechanics. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying my time on the game so far (30/40h).
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