Yeah, upper management at CDPR ignored the devs who told them the game wasn't ready to ship yet, but they really wanted to take advantage of the new market of players staying home and playing video games after covid first hit.
That short-sighted money grab cost them so much in the long run. It's actually insane to see CDPR's redemption arc play out after how badly they handled the launch.
Cyberpunk was in development for atleast 12 years, I agree that corporate needs to be hands off when it comes to things like that, but at what point is there a line drawn and you just have to publish what you have got.
Its worth mentioning that the 12 years was not at all productive. The first 6 years was basically just two guys with rough concepts, only 6 years of actual dev time. Then about 3 years in they got a new creative lead on the project who decided to scrap essentially everything and start from scratch on a whim. Then the devs get the release date the same time we do which is 2 years earlier than they expected having assumed that they’d get around 5 years of actual dev time since being made to start over.
So yeh there was a lot of screwing around by management.
I’ve never heard this claim. Googling it I see one thing that says 8, and that likely includes pre-production and all that stuff, before you move a full team into development. The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, so the team could not have moved to CP2077 before then, and some of them stayed to make the DLC and patches. That leaves 5 years of full time development, which is not odd for a modern AAA game.
I figured it was probably around 12 years, since the first teaser trailer came out 11 years ago, add afew years for the work they needed to do to even be ready to do a trailer (world lore, characters, etc)
It’s based off of a tabletop game. That trailer mostly just needed CGI work, and a basic feel for what they would aim for. That trailer was probably before pre-production even started.
Yeah, I think games just take longer to develop nowadays than anyone is prepared for, especially the managers. Both companies and gamers have yet to realize that there is only so much you can accomplish in a certain span of time.
I wouldn't count on millions of people suddenly all deciding to boycott now, if all the egregious practices of this industry weren't enough to get them to do it already.
I'm not. Choosing not to buy a bad product has incremental effects on what gets made in the market from 1 person choosing not to buy it all the way out to no one buying it.
Not really. Often companies degrade their products as a calculated choice, considering that they will save and increase their profits more than they will lose. If only a few people protest, which seems to be the case here, then they have no reason to change course.
But chosing to buy from companies that do better can at least carve out a niche.
That's exactly my point. At some point, Divinity: Original Sin was a niche. Now Baldur's Gate 3 is poised to be called Game of the Year and outsold Larian's wildest expectations. Many of those sales came from people who bought BG3 and not Starfield. That sends a message for what customers actually want. There wasn't some mass campaign to boycott Battlefield 2042; their customers just told them, by way of not buying it like they used to, that the product EA put out was not worth the price they were asking.
Honestly Bethesda games are just a modding sandbox for me. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Skyrim and I’m not sure I’ve ever finished the main quest. I know I’ve never taken a side in the civil war. The built in story and quests are important but my fun comes from downloading mods and just roaming like a wandering monk doing whatever quests I run into. Sometimes OP, other times with immersive mods or alternative perks or spells.
I’m probably not a typical gamer as I’ve had hundreds on hours into BG3 and only made it to act 3 once so far and have yet to finish any of my runs before I decide to have a relationship with someone different or try a durge run, or evil, or realized I forgot to resolve some quest that is now closed. I’m not sure how long a full run is maybe 100 hours? But it’s a lot to invest before I get bored and want to try something new.
I also have a need to collect all the gimmicky items even when I know I have or will get much better stuff for the slot. I play Bethesda games the same way. Gotta run over and collect the book of arcane bow if I’m going to be an archer…
Anyway, mods are a core part of the deal for me. They should prioritize them more.
It always impresses me how seemingly every corporation adopts this mindset of not needing the “little guy” to function. Like their company isn’t made up of “little guys” that produce their given product.
It was pretty much one of the biggest lessons of the whole covid affair. The groundfloor personel is the most essentiel part of everything. Without, the whole system collapses.
putting in an official way for users to create and load mods takes resources that the small indie company Bethesda just can't afford to use; the modders can do the work for that, too
Honestly all I want is to replace Laezels nipples with floppy peens. It’s all I ask for. It’s all I want. I love Baldurs Gate 3 but it’s missing this. I cannot hope to be satisfied fully in any other way. Im a reasonably happy guy with a reasonably good life but if someone was to make this I’d pay BIG money. I’m talking more than $5.
It’s unclear exactly what the developer’s standards threshold might be, given the mess that was deemed acceptable enough to release in the first place.
This should be the top comment. Anyone even considering the game at this point should really avoid it out of principle. The only way things like this will stop happening will be when people STOP BUYING SHIT-PERFORMING GAMES!
I did the same thing when I pre-ordered. I didn’t know it’d be this much of a clusterfuck. This feels almost as bad as KSP2, which I wanted so, so badly to be good…
Well, supposedly the devs have finally implemented autostrut in the upcoming update. I’m just in it for the multiplayer, which is going to be stupid fun if they don’t fuck it up. As an actual aero engineer, I’ve loved KSP since before I could remember, really.
Specially for devs in countries that don’t have tax treaties with the US, if you’re buying it in the US. They’ll refund you fully but still have to pay 30% of the value to uncle Sam.
At this point I’m surprised Nintendo still allows people to play their games at their own homes, and not exclusively in official Nintendo-branded Play Rooms that only exist in like 6 places outside Tokyo and costs $20/hr to rent.
I simply don’t believe this. They probably don’t count all the gamers, who get Amazon prime for all the twitch loot. Then you also have people who throw around subs like confetti. Thot streams.
very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.
live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That’s why twitch still don’t have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.
They’re also probably relying on AWS right? I’m assuming the pipeline for serving up prime video would be similar but it’s hard to tell how much that service “makes”. I feel like anything they’re using their own GPUs for is losing quite a bit of money compared to charging their cloud compute customers for it.
If twitch shuts down in a few months I won’t be surprised.
Since they are bought by Amazon I think any service they wasn’t on AWS would have been moved to AWS. Basically, on demand video streaming service (netflix, youtube, etc) does have finer control of how they want to re-encode and have like bit rate throttle on the server/client side so you don’t see too much buffering if internet connection is acting up. This means they can throttle you down to 360p like youtube auto if their data center isn’t fast enough to fetch the high bit rate yet and then feed you the higher quality one once they got it. (or down grade if your connection goes bad) But twitch stream is like I have a 10Mbits stream incoming and I have to copy, run a 2nd pass on the fly for different resolution, duplicate to outgoing servers and send to user all under 46s delay. I am not expert on the backend side and only have some experience dealing with streaming around 20162018. So to me that’s incredible feat but the short timespan means they can’t crunch the output bit rate even if it’s pretty static video. Compare to youtube, if I uploaded a 2030 minutes video in about 12GB on disk, it took them about 35 hours to re-encode, even if the source is already encoded with AV1. (I am not partner so I join the queue like any normal pleb on the internet.)
edit forgot to respond to the cloud GPU thing, I think AWS will be charging Twitch the same way as other company, so AWS aren’t really “losing” money if Twitch choose to use cloud instance with GPU(which would be kinda dumb). They need higher throughput for the data in/out so whatever the CPU ingest part I mentioned above is just to breakdown the stream and feed to user as quick as possible. They are not going to waste anytime to give you better quality stream with lower bandwidth cost. they just feed you whatever fits into their bandwidth budget basically.
Unions don’t work the same way in all european countries.
In France, the union I belong to is organized by local company and public service, with a spawling system of dual cascading federations by geographic sector and economic sector.
And there are several competing national union organizations which overlap. I don’t know exactly how the other ones are organized
This is the difference between a trade union and an industrial union. You can join an industrial union elsewhere in Europe or even in the US, such as the IWW.
Is there a practical reason they use those obnoxious screws or is it simply to discourage home repairs? When I had to replace my Switch’s fan last year, those insanely tiny screws were a pain in the ass to not accidentally strip.
I’m usually not one to advertise, but they provide extremely accurate and complete guides for precision electronics repair, and sell the necessary tools and parts with sufficient quality and reasonable prices.
Lack of graphics settings aren’t why I stopped playing. It’s the game mechanics. The game isn’t that fun for two major immersion breaking reasons.
Loading screens. So many loading screens. Just reminds me I’m using software instead of being in a universe.
Over reliance on fast travel. Yeah, space is boring. But why have a space setting at all if we are going to skip through it? Why bother building custom ships if there are no real challenges to overcome with them because spending time in space is not necessary at all ? Worse, it’s a bad experience because of the loading screens.
There should be a happy medium. I haven’t played Elite Dangerous in a year because I’m 50 jumps away from where I need to go, which means like 3 hours of nothing but travel. But the realism is out of this world. This Starfield thing of never needing to fly is too far in the other direction. I think a happy medium would be a system like Elite Dangerous, but if you need to travel more than a couple of systems over, have a long distance jump gate or something like that, and maybe autopilot. Eve online has jump gates and autopilot, but it can still take hours to cross the universe. It’s more entertaining to have a quick travel option for those scenarios. Eve has wormhole systems that will let you cross the entire universe in a few jumps, but finding those connections will take longer than just flying directly, unless you’re in a huge wormhole corporation that uses 3rd party tools to map all of the wormhole connections to known space.
I’m not sure. I guess because they go hard in the simulation aspect of the game. Although if we’re being realistic, it’s unrealistic that you’d have an interstellar space ship without an autopilot. I read that there are mods to enable autopilot, but I also read they can get your account banned, so I stopped looking into them.
Its not about good game design.
Its a kind of DRM - a move inspired by the hypothesis that making a game hard to pirate will improve sales.
The data suggests that hypothesis is false.
An EU-funded study found that profits of blockbuster movies are negatively impacted by piracy, music industry profits are unaffected, and profits from selling books and video games are increased by piracy.
Everyone loves to hate on it, but one thing that Star Citizen absolutely nails is the sense of immersion. From the time you load in until the time you are inevitably disconnected from the server, and from ground to ship to space, you are in one experience with no loading screens
I’m 50 jumps away from where I need to go, which means like 3 hours of nothing but travel
If you upgrade your fuel scoop, that’ll cut down your time severely. I can do about 30 jumps an hour with my Krait Phantom. Refuels before my FSD is even cooled down.
Given every single system in Starfield is already explored and built on, I think they should have just given up on the jump system and gone with a gate system like Freelancer or the X series. You get to fly to every point without menus while still being time efficient. The reason they didn’t go with this is presumably because of the supposed “exploring the unknown” angle, but you never explore anywhere new in Starfield anyway.
I must confess that sometimes fast travel removes a lot of value from a game. While it saves you a lot of time like a cheat. Cheats also save you time.
You see this issue when one of your core game loop isn’t enjoyable. It happens a lot in games, and you notice it if a game gives you and item or ability to play the game less.
This can be okay if this item comes in just as that loop gets boring (like you unlock special flash grab drives part way through the game). But if they let you fast travel from the beginning the likely case is that they found the whole space travel boring and they ended up providing a way around it.
Which leaves people asking “why’d you bother adding it in there”
So a few years ago I wanted to play a Japanese version of a rhythm game that isn’t available to purchase in the USA and decided to try my hand at modding my switch for this one game.
After(poorly) doing it, I wasn’t able to play that game AND Nintendo bricked me. All my games on my switch that I purchased were unable to download or play anymore.
So I went and set out to mod my switch correctly.
Now if I actually wanted to give Nintendo money, they won’t allow me to. So my only option from then on is to pirate.
They basically turned a potentially paying customer to a non paying customer.
So, this is a basic security principle. If the system of access is too “secure” or too inconvenient, people will create workarounds.
Need keys for all the doors every second of every day? You’ll find duct tape on all the latches.
Password is 15 characters and changes every 60 days? You’re going to find post-its under keyboards.
Spread all digital content across 8 streaming providers that cost about $180/y? Torrent time.
Nintendo wants to brick users for trying to play an out of region game they paid for? They’ll never pay again and will reverse engineering your shit out of spite.
Same thing we saw with the music industry utterly failing to embrace internet distribution. Limewire and bearshare are their fucking lunch.
When will they learn to just make access easy? People, generally, would rather pay than pirate but when you start making shit difficult, nobody wants to play your games anymore and you see massive losses.
i have an account on my ps4 (and ps5) that i log into and suddenly i’m in a different region. the ps5 says i only get so many region changes, but i can log into the accounts as many times as i want
Never tried. I’m a ps guy now, but the point is that there shouldn’t be region codes to begin with.
Anywhere I’ve ever seen a region code to be changeable you only get to change it a certain number of times before you get stuck in a region. This is why you’ll find TBD players that have been firmware flashed to be regionless.
You cannot have your bank account stolen from a Rock. People will never get your personal files or medical info from a Rock. People will never spy on you through the Rock.
I disagree on the premise that a rock cannot be used for much. I mean, the available actions for a rock ARE pretty limited, but it can be used in a variety of ways!
Next time just use a Switch emulator. Sudachi is a good one.
You can even download Fitgirl Repacks of Switch titles that include the emulator already set up and ready to go. Literally just a one click install and you’re playing.
Ah okay, thanks. I’m too scared to mess with most hardware so not always up to date on the terminology. My tinkering is exclusively desktop/laptop stuff.
It’s 100% worth the mod OR put that money toward a steam deck/Linux handheld. Im actually looking to sell this switch to put towards another steam deck. Sooo many more options and better support, not locked into Nintendo bullshit. Put whatever you want on it (like 95% of games right now, I’ve had very few issues) but did have to learn a bit. Beats the hell out of a locked down ecosystem 100000%.
I didn’t know you could do that. I’m in Taiwan and I know Steam doesn’t let you make a purchase without a local credit card. So I imagine that’s the case for Japan.
But it worked so well with the multiplayer shooter Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League by Rocksteady Studios! /s
I know it’s not an MMO but there’s parallels there
I love the Horizon games (didn’t play the Lego version though) and it’s similar to the Batman games but don’t have any interest in an MMO or Live Action Shooter for them.
Real question: after WoW had been around for a year or so, were you still unhappy about it? I never played any of the Warcraft games before WoW and had never played any MMOs before Wow, so I had no feeling either way about the announcement. I started playing WoW because two of my close friends and two of my coworkers were playing a bunch, so it was a good way to have more gaming friends than just my one gaming friend. Were most WC3 players unhappy about the announcement? It’s clear that millions of people ended up being pretty happy about it in the end.
After WoW had been around for a year or so, were you still unhappy about it?
Nah, I enjoyed WoW well enough for what it is. When WoW was announced there was a lot of skepticism on whether or not a company that was primarily known for their RTS games could make an MMO, along with a decent amount of “Who asked for this”. In hindsight I’m also a bit bitter that we never got and never will get Warcraft 4 though. To some degree Blizzard basically stopped developing games for a few years due to WoW’s success consuming the company.
Were most WC3 players unhappy about the announcement?
I think most of them would have preferred another RTS game.
Point was Warcraft was primarily single player RTS. Yes, with multiplayer mode but MMORPG is pretty big genre shift. In the end, it’s just about using the IP, nothing more.
You gave examples of games that tried something like this that failed, I just pointed out an example where it was quite successful.
We will never know if the Horizon MMO would be good or bad. I think the IP would fit MMO genre quite well tbh.
The real issue with live service game failiures is that studios design cash grabs, not games they would want to play.
Oh, I didn’t mean this-therefore-that … I was trying to say that these two games in my experience having enjoyed the single-player, I think would have failed in the multiplayer realm as the desire doesn’t seem to be there. I’m certain there are examples in the opposite direction.
The IP “could” make sense as the gameplay goes for a very fetch questy type of mechanic and the land is vast and they could expand the lore.
I was just assuming (out of my ass) that these successful single-player story driven games are “forced” to do multiplayer games for cash grabs.
Albeit Blizzard did it for WarCraft, but I always saw Blizzard differently in this regard as it seemed like they had (very much past tense) the desire to do so.
Might have been a cash grab - in fact it likely was. But I tend to reserve my judgement. I’m not on the live service hate train - in fact I’m often interested in what they might have on offer. I like to have a main game, and live service games are great for people like me as there is always something to look forward to. And I for one fucking hate the constant cach grab fails.
People always hate on live service games just because of the label, but there is serious lack of good live service games compared to good single player games.
My comment migh’ve come partyl from a place of frustration so apologies if I was harsh or something
Quality isn’t necessarily measured by desire. One can enjoy something they never desired before it existed. And one can loathe something they always desired before it was made, see the Warcraft movie (for me, at least).
Yeah you’re absolutely right in terms of concept. I mean if you dig into my example, Suicide Squad could have been a good live-action shooter as well. Marvel Rivals is cooking right now.
I think my initial impression was switching a single-player studio over, but I lost that message in my reply. I also think it could be fun to take down mechs together as a team.
Just pulling it out of my ass, I didn’t think I see the appetite and if it’s not there then we could be left with a lackluster game.
I’m a big Horizon fan. Although I need to try Monster Hunter, my friends love it.
I vaguely remember The Matrix had an MMO that apparently evolved the lore in some crazy ways. And I’m going to guess they abandoned that for the new one.
To be fair, it was envisioned as multiplayer from the start, then dialed down and “settling” with HZD, then tried again before HFW and into the one with the 3D headset (mountain call or something?) and they kept saying they’d get to that original plan eventually. Does the Lego Horizon game have any of it? I want to believe the success of HZD and HFW as single-player helped them give that up in the end.
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