Activision wasn’t just a studio, it was a huge publisher with several studios, that’s why they needed approval from competition regulators. I doubt they will stop buying studios over this in the short-term.
I just want games made by people who are trying to make a good game, and not games made by people or companies that are only trying to make money. Not one GaaS game is actually special enough to warrant spending more than the base price of the game on (and many aren’t even worth that when their next best competitor is fuckin’ free to play.)
How independent is Relic really if they got bought by an unnamed external investor? Still better than getting axed and hoping the same kinda layoffs won‘t just come later („The studio hasn’t indicated if it will lay off any workers as part of the shift“).
The investor has a stake in the company, so they share in the successes and take on the risk of failure, but they provide capital to make this purchase from the parent company in the first place.
I mean that’s how most independent studios work. There’s always someone with money investing into the studio, be it an external investor or sometime at the studio.
Well, the studio that brought us TS had been closed down in 2009 already. Deep Silver had opened a new studio under that name in 2021 (admittedly employing parts of the “old gang”), which is the one we’re now seeing getting shut down.
After Crytek had thoroughly fucked them, yes. Much of the key people were the same and thats really what I referred to. The Old Guarde did not survive a second fall.
More importantly, people who directly influenced my childhood via Goldeneye and the original TS were in there when it went down again. To them, I give the mightiest of salutes.
That’s because it actually is the exact same image
Whoever wrote this article messed up and pasted the same image twice for the Au Ra race, which is the first one shown here. The actual before and after shots are pretty obvious
Edit: this is not true, I was recalling a different event. Links are down the thread
I'm not sure if the image has since been updated, but the horn-y boy before/after isn't the same image twice despite looking very similar. The left image has light-colored areas on the horns and some other similarly minor differences which are more noticeable when flicking between them but kinda hard to spot in a side-by-side.
Ah, I do see what you mean upon closer inspection. You have a keen eye
However, this is most likely due to the author grabbing the two images from a different source which subjected them to different compression artifacts. They definitely both are the same model, even if the actual image files are not 1:1
I play the game and have followed these updates as they came out, so I was able to tell very quickly from looking at the hair and eyes. But don’t take my word for it: I quickly tracked down the actual before/after shots. Sorry for reddit link
It is the same model, but the difference is in the horns and scales. Those pics don't do a very good job of showing it, though. From the paragraphs right above the pics:
Following community feedback after the announcement of the graphical update back at the fan festival event in Las Vegas, he shared an update of the Au Ra race, whose updated horns and scales had been initially revealed as looking very reflective but a little too much like enamel.
“This reflectivity looked very high quality so it was good for showing off, but it didn't really match our vision of what we wanted the Au Ra to look like from our original design back in 3.0, so we continued tweaking,” Yoshida admitted before sharing a new headshots of a male and female Au Ra where their horns look less reflective and more natural. “This goes for all of the updates for the other races as well. What we showed in Las Vegas wasn't the final product but a work in progress.”
It’s all a bit tangled up now, but the second set of pictures in the article shows the current in-game models and then the remade models, where you can clearly see the difference in the hair. The first set (the one in question here) shows the remade one, and then the remade-remade one with the muted horn texture.
I remembered this particular Au Ra from the slideshow about 4 months ago, so when I noticed the distinct hair being the same in both and found the original slides I tunnel visioned on that. But in truth, what we are seeing is a second pass after player feedback from the event I incorrectly believed the shots were from.
I apologize for not being as in-tune with the game’s news as I had assumed. I do not play an Au Ra myself so I had been kind of tuning out the drama around the scales and their luster. But it (and the changing of the glowing eye rings) has been an ongoing pain point for many. People get really attached to their look
As someone who has put countless hours into various MMOs (including FFXIV), I totally get people getting anxious about their characters looks potentially changing. I remember when WoW had their character model update as the feedback from players then. Blizzard resolved the issue by adding a client-side option to toggle between old and new character models.
Hmm, they aren’t clear whether it’s fully voice-acted or whether he provided phonetic sounds for them to synthesize according to the text, but in either case, it’s not AI whatsoever.
Important to note that ESS Technologies (the company cited there) was literally a company who made synthesized speech for video games.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer’s technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games.
I think tech like this makes way more sense for like random ass NPCs. Like the ones cluttering the background of a city or whatever. AI could really enhance them and make them interesting.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
Considering how they completely messed up the launch of Payday 3, and then furthermore saying since (among other things) that they’d work on including an offline mode, only to decide after about 20 months that they’re not gonna do it after all due to “it wasn’t a feasible route for us” (Steam news) proves to me that they’re only thinking about the money, not the player. And fortunately, as with most companies who focus purely on the money, they get dumped by the userbase for it, as evident in the other comment here.
I could be wrong here, but this feels like a larger trend of trying to consolidate profits. Cut out anything/anyone “unnecessary”. Similar to the whole AI trend.
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