I’m sorry, but I still can’t help but laugh about the anti-woke Asterion flat-butt mod, and now in my head I just see all anti-woke gamers as jealous flat-butters.
How can Breath of the Wild which was originally a Wii U release looks so much more refined and artistically appealing while running better than anything Gamefreak has made in the last 8 years?
In comparison to XC2 or 3, the recent pokemon games look like an insult, and a bad joke. I’m still mindblown by that Nintendo greenlit those releases, given how specific they are with other first-party game designs
IIRC BOTW was built on MonolithSoft’s engine (the devs behind Xenoblade) so in fairness, those games are more-so the same exception rather than the rule. That said, even without the comparison, GameFreak clearly did not properly optimize the Pokemon games on switch, with stuff like loading the whole map’s ocean at any given time.
also mr masuda said he was tired of pokemon in general, and will make this slop, this was all the way back sword and shield, when he shocked everyone about the half the dex being left out.
I'm waiting for when the US votes to get rid of libraries because it's hurting profits. This is an insane reason not to let people play games you can't even buy anymore.
Calling DA2 serviceable is probably some of the highest praise it’s received. The game is steaming dookie. It took out every single thing that made Origins a masterpiece and gave us a dialogue wheel and an entire game made of 5 copy+pasted rooms. Also a nonsensical main plot with no real player agency and the most forgettable ending of all.
DAI is mid af but it looks like a God damn masterpiece next to DA2.
If they hadn’t reused the maps it’d been remembered as one of the greats.
I also thought the balance on Nightmare or whatever was an atrocious mix of ubertank enemies and getting one-shot by rogues but the actual story and companions were fantastic.
What exactly do you mean by that? Like, he could have indeed been a well meaning mage just trying to live under templar thumbs? Instead of also being exactly the smoking gun?
The Orsino fight doesn’t make much sense if you side with the mages - there was no reason for him to go Akira monster when he did. Even BioWare acknowledged how little sense it made, in a conversation you can have with Varric in Inquisition.
Listen, it might’ve looked cheap as fuck, but I found a certain charm in the “every dungeon interior is just one of three dungeons with different parts blocked off”. Plus the combat flowed really well. I played that whole game through like… 5 times. One right after the other.
If you play it after coming off Mass Effect 1, the “every colony bunker or mine is one of three options” regardless of the planet just becomes part of that Old BioWare’s aesthetic.
Great ideas, cool combat system, great art style and graphics, ruined by writing that was somehow chaotic and utterly predictable at the same time and stupid ass kill ten rats/fetch 10 letters filler quests.
Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov (the lead artist) formed their own company Red Info in 2023. I will only recognise a game as Disco Elysium’s successor if it comes from them.
This might be a controversial opinion, but please hear me out: this guy is absolutely overhyped.
I saw the entire ZA/UM situation from the outside without having ever played Disco Elysium before, so I don’t have any stake or bias in what happened. In my personal opinion there are 2 important notes: Yes, Kurvitz is responsible for the creation of one of the best games of all time. He also is a massive asshole who abuses his workers. Both of these can be true and don’t contradict each other.
I can really recommend the Documentation by People Make Games about it, I think they made great and very neutral reporting on it, getting everybody’s side of the story. But one think becomes increasingly clear throughout the video: the original creator is a huge egomaniac.
I came to dislike him the more I heard him talk. He spouts how he comes from this underground punk scene, but also betrays every value that he should hold. He doesn’t think his workers are important and that they should just endure his wrath at all times. He doesn’t see how multiple people can be of importance to a project besides him of course. As soon as the money came in he threw every value he said he’d hold aside to become a huge capitalist, even going so far as making his own shell company that preemptively held the rights to a sequel just so he can profit from it more.
This entire situation is his fault. A “punk” ignores all his anticapitalist values, gives all his intellectual property to a capitalist, capitalism ensues and he becomes bitter because he didn’t get a greater slice of the pie.
Let me be clear: I think a sequel should involve him. But I also believe he shouldn’t be in a lead game designer position, more of a “lead story designer/writer”. He has shown to not be all to competent in that and he WILL abuse his workers again. Somebody needs to be above him to manage his insanity.
Nothing against you, but I think endlessly hyping him up won’t lead to that or even a good outcome. He will squander everything that he will be given. He is not a good person, he is a “Rockstar Developer” and I mean that as an insult.
Shitty people are abundant in the creative industries, I have no delusions about that. Probably even more of those that have no public presence. But that has no bearing on whether or not he should retain sole ownership of his work. It’s an entirely separate issue. Andrzej Sapkowski is also a massive douchebag, but nobody would deny that The Witcher is his property.
I totally agree. Problem is just that he legally sold it, so he kinda fucked himself on that. It’s also interesting to see how nobody in that situation seemed to have good intentions, just a bunch of assholes all around
I’m not convinced that is the case. The studio was purchased by a holdings company, then its CEO bought four early sketches of DE from the studio for pocket change. When Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere (writer) objected, they were demoted and later fired. Unless another exchange took place, I don’t see how this would amount to Kurvitz selling his rights; at the very least, he still owns Sacred And Terrible Air (with DE itself naturally belonging to the studio).
There are also some pretty chill creative people who don’t care about the money and the fame much. Even though having money is nice and makes your life much easier.
Marketing is a big money drain for a lot of games too. Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V are two games with marketing budgets big enough to finance a dozen other games. I guess a new title like cyberpunk would need more marketing (still not $142 million worth of marketing) but GTA was already a well established franchise that probably didn’t need as much marketing as it had.
Even games like call of duty and assassins creed which have a core fan base that can expect a new game on a regular basis don’t need to market as much as they do.
I think marketing is always important no matter how established you are. Coca Cola aren’t skimping on their marketing budget even if they’re the most recognizable brand in the world.
It’s about constantly reminding everybody “hey, I exist! Don’t you want to buy me?”.
I was just talking about this the other day. I think Coke and some companies have reached a saturation point that makes advertisements useless.
I dont know if we have any data to model off of, but I’d love to see if their profits dip by any meaningful amount if they stopped advertising for 3 months straight. Let the movie theaters, and the restaurants, and the culturally embedded soft drink preferences do their thing and see if the dial moves.
I don’t think they would keep investing in marketing if they didn’t know if it worked. I’m just guessing, but I believe there’s a noticeable bump in sales after a successful marketing campaign.
And that’s what I think they’re failing to measure. I think they’re unable to accurately divorce the increase in sales from other incentives/market forces, and so they’re just doing what they’ve been doing regardless of actual merit, or the merit is being improperly evaluated
Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be marketing at all. Just that marketing budgets for many AAA blockbusters have become so bloated, they can account for nearly half of the development cost. As someone with very little knowledge as to how games get made, it seems like some of that money could be better used
I think I played maple story in like 2007 and it was garbage then. My excuse at the time was I was broke, and there weren’t many good free games out. Path of Exile wasn’t until 2013. Same with Warframe. Huh I never realized those came out the same year.
I get that, but to me it all feels like cookie cutter material. Maybe I’m not searching right, and maybe I haven’t discovered enough, but I can’t help but feel extremely whelmed.
In terms of exploration, it’s very similar to No Man’s Sky, another boring space game. Every planet has similar terrain, similar plants and animals, similar goals, and similar structures. The differences are ambient light shades, colors and patterns on the plants and animals, and clutter in the artificial areas. The player can go scan life forms and blast bad guys. That’s about it.
But I don’t see how it could be any other way. How else does a studio scale up a galaxy such that every one of the 1000-odd planets is its own unique, interesting, engaging snowflake of a setting without spending hundreds of employee-years on each one?
Maybe AI will be the answer, but I’m not holding my breath.
Skyrim and fallout were also complete Games when they were released. However, they were buggy disasters. It took tons of modders to fix them and make them what they are today.
And bethesda didn’t have to lift a finger.
… but don’t let me get in the way of that blind loyalty of yours. You’ve got that “new game honeymoon” thing going on. You should enjoy it while it lasts.
Isn’t that kinda the entire point to Bethesda games and has been since at least oblivion? The modability of their games has long been their big selling point.
If the selling point it’s that they require mods to work correctly, and they don’t pay those that out in the countless hours to make them, they shouldn’t make games. Period.
Dead within 2 years. They also had the balance pretty fucked until about 6 months in. All in all, no one should expect much from the company who makes games “built from the ground up with paid DLC in mind.”
I mean, drop shipping does feel like it could be easily profitable for someone with clout and a following to peddle his upcharged wares to. At least he’s doing better than last time when he was immediately shut down because the product was illegal (included roms), or when he bought an atari nft that he thought meant he owned atari. I really want to know how much he paid for that nft that he thought he owned the entire company
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