If anything, Duskbloods further confirms this is a B game. They took a mode of Elden Ring/Dark/Demon Souls that people have historically loved (jolly coop) and built a game around that. It is no different than building a game around dodging (Bloodborne), blocking/parrying and traversal (Sekiro), or even just one off arena fights (… MANY of the Armored Core expandalones).
They built it for Nightreign. They did a much scaled down version for Duskbloods as a way to get a sack of cash from Nintendo and to pressure Sony into letting them go back to an IP they like (Bloodborne).
It really IS fun to watch reactions from people who have never had any experience with From outside of as “The Dark Souls company”. They have ALWAYS done this kind of shit (hell, they even did it recently with the VR game nobody played). They have their A team work on their flagship IP whether that is Dark Souls or Armored Core or King’s Field. They have their B team(s) work on more experimental games. Sometimes it is something nobody ever remembers (was it Decirine?) and sometimes it is a cult favorite like Shadow Tower Abyss or Bloodborne. But the existence of Master of the Arena didn’t mean an AC2 wasn’t coming just like AC2 Another Age being weird barely connected missions on a pseudo-tactical map didn’t mean we weren’t getting AC3 and so forth.
Miyazaki: At first it was being worked on by a small team as a title for Nintendo Switch. However just as the game started to take shape, we were approached by Nintendo with talk of Switch 2, which led us to revamp our development path with this new hardware in mind.
I'm still waiting on the killer titles for the current generation of consoles. I'm frankly amazed that games have become so difficult to make, given how the graphical improvements aren't leaps. Build a stylish lighting system, make sure your textures and geometry aren't too ropey, and then make something creative.
I know it's not that simple, obviously, but I was playing through a fifteen year old FPS yesterday and the difference between now and then is just not that big. It's not nothing but the Gameboy philosophy of doing more with less would go a long way.
I feel like something about this should be incredibly illegal, since it basically amounts to Tencent trying to sidestep every other investor in the company to gain total ownership of the valuable IPs.
Despite privacy and bloat concerns from some people online, I don’t think a single person I know would buy a TV if it couldn’t run streaming apps on it.
and then show a screenshot of a game that looks objectively worse than a low-budget movie tie-in from 2007. I mean look at the 1 tile, non-randomized, no noise, no depth, repeating light effect on the water with 0 effort put in to even make it look slightly good. The depth of field and fog looks like it is from pokemon pearl with a gaussian blur put on top of it.
Rise isn’t a good for comparison because Rise was designed for the switch. Or course it’s going to run exceptionally well on the Deck. It probably runs better than World, because World was designed for X1/PS4.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not defending the poor performance of Wilds, they did the exact same shit with World. I’m just clarifying that Rise performance was probably never going to happen.
I’ll purchase this in around a year or more with dlc still playing the first to completion almost done with it on my last hardcore playthrough getting virgin + merciful + hardcore achievements… Really good one of my favorite 100%s so far
I was lucky enough to catch the big dip a few months back, my hope is that they have a big enough library that someone just buys it. But the Guillemot’s want to have their cake and eat it by selling but maintaining control. There’s a big old battle with the big shareholders and the Guillemot’s. It jumped 33% when tencent made plans to buy it. Course they could just liquidate the whole thing and walk off. The Guillemot’s really are being almost negligent at this point I think now more people have lost their jobs for ego.
Sony had like 10 subscription/ live service games in the pipe when Concord flopped. All canceled now.
Evey games developer want’s a fortnite but they can’t understand that multiple games designed to maximize player investment and dominate their time can’t coexist.
Conversely, lack of proper management is also an issue on a lot of videogames projects. Probably has never happened at Ubisoft but I’ve seen it firsthand in small studios
EA lost its reputation but objectively they’ve been trying to undo that. Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, while stuttery, had no micro transactions or online requirements, Dead Space remake was as simple as possible, Dragon Age ditched live service plan and was released in a very polished state, NFS Unbound just got a new update and has been well supported. The games may not be 10/10 or exactly what gamers wanted, but they’ve been trying to put their head down and do the work.
I agree with the other user who said it’s a writing problem e.g. choosing the immediacy of end of the world plot device. Unless it’s done with very specific circumstances, like Overcooked 1 where the first level is the Spaghetti Monster Apocalypse and then you jump back in time through a portal. I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good example of this exact problem the article raises though. It’s a relatively short game, but there is no end of the world. There are 2 major events, your destiny as the Arisen to fight the dragon that killed you, and the in-world politics of a government and some corrupt individuals working to prevent this event for their own plan.
I mention this game primarily because it uses a mechanic that many completionists tend to dislike - there are “timed” quests. Not all of them, usually ones that make sense to run out of time on (but again, not all of them.) So for example, at one point there is a quest to attend a masquerade ball, which is a permanent main story quest until you choose to attend. This is the exact issue the premise of the article brings up, where time is infinite until you decide to continue.
And yet, at the same time, there are a few quests where you may encounter a random NPC who is asking for help for someone who goes missing, and if too many in game days pass by, well… They die.
Ultimately I had other pacing issues with the story, but I did really enjoy how it goes about “solving” urgency when an in-game world timer exists. I’ve never been the biggest fan of time-managed items, (for example, raw potato, ripened potato, rotten potato over the course of 1-3 days), but Dragon’s Dogma 1 and 2 both did it fairly well since the items that do expire 1) make sense, it’s food, and 2) are in fair abundance. It helps solve the hoarding of your items, gives you a little extra money if you sell it as the right phase, and allows for varied item combinations as well (raw+item = curative, ripe+item = stamina, rotten+rotten = oil for lantern or status effect combinations).
I think really the issue just comes down to what is fun gameplay mechanics? Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu for PS2/Gamecube had timed levels, a mechanic that makes sense for a game centered around saving people before they kill hostages. Star Ocean had an in game timer matched to clocks, so the only way to stop the timer was to turn off the game. After (24?) hours, it’s game over. Quite frankly… timed mechanics are usually seen as gimmicky and are not very popular - they may have moments of appreciation, but I’m not sure if it’s a beloved mechanic.
Which in turn results in, “I have you now Spider-Man! In just 8 hours my bomb will blow New York to high heavens!” And then the player goes to help every child get their balloon back before the main story progresses.
“Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional,” Hulst continued, “but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options [and] after much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.”
But why? Did they actually think it was going to cost more money to keep the servers running than it would bring in? What’s the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?
Matchmaking took upwards of 10 minutes. Maybe they could capture a core audience but all that waiting would alienate even more people. Increasing the wait time even more. They could have invested more money and re-release it, but how much money would it take to overhaul the game. And there is no guarantee, that a 2.0 would be played more. So giving it up is probably the best solution, not burning even more money. Keep in mind, it costed about 400 million $ to make.
These companies really need to learn the private server model. How is your game ever going to get up enough players to be popular when you’re financially incentivized to bail as soon as possible? Put up some public servers for players to hop on, put out a private server, and let people do their own thing. You can still monetize DLCs or even go the route TF2 went and release paid items and loot crates.
People are still playing TF2 and still spending money in the item shop. They definitely wouldn’t be if Valve had bailed on it entirely the first time they had a slump in their playerbase.
That’s kinda a weird take, since the private server model was the only model until 10 years ago or so. Companies definitely know it. It’s just not financially efficient comparing to benefiting from economies of scale with hosting. Plus you don’t lose a ton of money or piss of players if you over or under estimate how popular the game will be.
Had they gone with private servers here, they would have lost even more money than they already have. The problem here is they spent too much money on a game no one wanted to play, chasing a fad that ended before it launched.
How exactly are you presuming to accurately estimate future sales that don’t exist yet? They increased their cost of operation substantially by relying solely on servers they themselves host, and tie the future viability of their product to hosting those servers. That means there’s a clock on how long it makes sense to make the game available to the public.
If they allowed for private servers, that small initial batch of players could potentially grow. Especially if they build in the extensibility of allowing players to mod the game. As it stands, the game now won’t make them any more money, and creating the opportunity for it to ever make them money had a continuous cost. There would be no incentive to shut down access to the game itself if it didn’t carry a cost to the company.
If they happened to be one of the few successful games in their genre, then sure, hosting their own servers exclusively is a potential means of revenue. But if they’re not? It makes much more sense to leave the thing out there for people to fool around with. You never know when one streamer with a following might pick up a game and decide they like it. Can’t happen if it doesn’t exist though.
Oh shit, I’m sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying, I thought you were referring to them purchasing and running their own physical server hardware as opposed to running their servers off of a cloud platform.
I was keeping in mind that they put that much money in, surely all that money has made something playable that would make some money, whereas throwing it all away makes nothing at all, right?
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