I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.
TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.
I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.
I’m curious to see how the combat mechanics will be accepted. Reads like Mass Effect in a high fantasy setting. Could be cool, but at the same time, Dragon Age fans will come to expect something more strategic.
My impression from the trailer was that the combat lacks any weight. The player character floated all over, the attacks looked like they didn’t even make contact, and the enemies seemed to be on the spongy side. That makes it look and feel bland. If that is the case the reaction won’t be great even from players who like action games.
And yeah, I think making this the first Dragon Age game after so long is a mistake. People will expect a game that follows on with same or similar gameplay. This feels like a spin-off game. That’s not inherently bad, but you do want mainline games to also release to keep the main fan base happy. Right now it’ll just be judged compared to mainline expectations and will obviously not meet most of those.
Seriously, good writing doesn’t happen with “lifehacks,” that’s how you get worthless shit like Max Landis writing Bright. (Don’t you love white people trying to write about racism… without writing about racism? Just plop in any old fantasy race and it works, right? Right!?)
I recall almost two decades ago I got into it with a woman who was going to school at Digipen, and she told me what Digipen taught students about writing a game.
She said the point was to create the most everyman main character, so you could have the most customers identify with them, and be able to sell more units.
Which I basically said “They’re teaching you the worst writing techniques possible. Literature students would faint at this idea.”
She didn’t care, she claimed this was “good writing.”
No wonder so many games have such dogshit writing if this is how we’re teaching game writers to write for fucks sake. Pick up a god damned book and get thoughtful, people.
Like seriously, let’s get game adaptations of weird, interesting books like Steppenwolf or Naked Lunch.
Rush your development, causing network issues, bugs, missing QoL features
Push ahead with monetization schemes despite problems
Players vanish
Surprised Pikachu face
Congratulations Starbreeze, you made a game so shitty that it’s not even worth pirating. They will practically have to relaunch the game to reclaim the playerbase at this point.
Don’t forget taking forever for an initial patch release, despite there being multiple game breaking bugs.
The state the game was at release was absolutely awful.
The only folks who kept playing that I know were folks grinding for the final levels/achievements/weapons. Which consisted of playing in unenjoyable ways like using bad load outs, doing stupid crap like tagging a billion guards, etc. Who wants to pay money for an unenjoyable grind?
They released a decent patch, some new content and DLC but everyone has already moved on. They totally screwed themselves, sucks it’s an IP that I like, but more games need to fail like this so publishers stop doing the same bullshit
Way too late to form a strike team, are they even working to fix it?
Years ago the CEO put comments to the media about wanting to make a game to run over the long term. If you want that then don’t put out a game that flops at the start.
The developers have full on ignored player feedback, and just putting in what they feel like and maybe a handful of Payday 2 brought in as a bonus. Infrequent updates on the Steam Community, never responding to users, releasing a DLC people couldn’t play and saying “have a nice weekend” on X.
A patch finally comes but it introduces new bugs, many big issues still unaddressed, game still dropping frames and unoptimized.
Are the devs shitfaced drunk while making this game? If they can get money while hardly doing work I’d want to work there.
I uninstalled the game, and even if the game were to massively improve, I wouldn’t return as the studio treats players like nothing but money generators.
Stop blaming Devs and blame corpo above them. Can’t guarantee that’s the case here but it’s almost always their fault rather than the Devs when things go wrong on a launch like this.
Maybe they should unionize or walkout or something, costumers can’t fight their fight.
As proven with Volition, if we don’t buy their game in protest they are closed down anyway instead of getting another shot at something we actually want, nothing can change from this side.
Man, was this game a disappointment. So many privacy agreements just to install the bloody thing. The entire experience was a letdown. PD2 was so so so much fun and this game arrived just wobbly and with pre-shat pants. What a damn dud.
Ifrs 16 makes things complicated, I wouldn’t pay attention to that part unless you are interested in the specifics of the companies financials. The point is that revenue and profit were up
You’d think Microsoft would calm down on the cloud after the massive Xbox One failure and underwhelming results of their live service games like Halo Infinite. Guess they never learn.
What are you on about? Xbox one literally tried to sell itself as a cloud console with games like Crackdown 3 leveraging cloud computing. Nobody wanted it and it failed. That’s literally what they’re suggesting the new console is.
So your think crackdown 3 failed because of the cloud computing element? And not because it was a second sequel to a game, which was only popular because it exposed the Halo 2 multiplayer beta?
Or that Microsoft, putting a new feature in the game is them trying to sell the whole console based on that feature?
Well it’s a leak so they’re not suggesting a single thing. It will probably be closer to how certain GamePass games are playable in the cloud and that works rather flawlessly but go on and complain about nothing.
Xbox One as a whole failed because it’s not at all what people want. Aside from the fact that you need amazing internet for games that would support cloud computing, it felt like a gimmick and still does now. I brought up their live service games because that’s where they’d want to do something like that on, and if they can’t make a good live service game now they won’t with The Cloud™
It will probably be closer to how certain GamePass games are playable in the cloud and that works rather flawlessly but go on and complain about nothing.
You’re the one arguing… And the article says otherwise…
it wants to develop a “hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences.”
Microsoft said it envisions the next-gen device as being “optimized for real time gameplay and creators,” with the company adding it will “enable new levels of performance beyond the capabilities of the client hardware alone.”
Wow, you really drank the capitalist tea haven’t you? You’re sitting over there with how much capital to your name? Probably absolutely nothing and saying that some a company selling 58 million units is a failure. But go off keep sucking that capitalistic cock and buying their shit.
@chloyster So if I want to reinstall a game I have to decide if it's worth making the dev pay more money due to my game reinstall or install on another device? Is that what I'm reading?
The most they’ll have to pay is 20 cents. And that’s only with the 200,000th to 210,000th download for developers who are using the free version of Unity (provided that the developer is also making more then $200k/yr in revenue). After that, the developer will probably get Unity Pro and the download fees will start up at $1 million/yr in revenue and more than 1 million downloads. At that point, I don’t think that the 15 cents to 0.1 cents that will be charged will hurt too badly.
Unless there's a coordinated effort by a fanbase to install the game over and over again because the game asked you for your preferred pronouns or some nonsense. Or maybe a pirated copy of the game still phones home to Unity and charges the developer. There are a lot of ways this could be problematic.
One Dev have already pointed out that they have a Unity based game due next year they’ve already contracted to game pass, so that’s 20 million odd subs who’ll have access to try the game, where as they didn’t negotiate with MS on the price knowing this clause was coming.
Is there a reliable way to detect the presence of AI content in games? I’m guessing that if you submitted a game to Steam with some AI generated content mixed in, nobody would ever know, so a rule against it would be effectively pointless anyway.
Programmatically? Not really. There are efforts among the major LLMs and content creation tools to embed digital watermarks in AI generated media. But, especially for 3d games where most of these are textures, that is pretty difficult.
What I do see is a focus on computer vision to identify/isolate assets and then look up the provenance of those. Whether it is ripped out of a different game, part of a commonly available asset pack, or registered as having been made by an LLM. Which I actually would expect Epic to push for (since they have an asset store…) but… yeah.
In the UK at least there’s a persistent cost-of-living battle being fought, so we’re not spending as much as we were, and large game production has reached a tipping point where the number of purchasers aren’t growing but costs are increasing, so: studios contract; or games are taking longer to make; or games are made with a smaller scope. So basically, there’s less to upgrade your console for.
I mean, for me personally, everytime I think of upgrading from a Series S I find it hard to justify because most games run quite well.
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