Arkane- I mean, yeah Redfall was a clunker but Dishonored, Deathloop, and Prey all did pretty well I thought… though I suppose the two Wolfenstein games they did were kinda trash so there is a bit of falloff between the “glory days” and now.
Tango- Hi-Fi Rush was a bop, and Ghostwire did well enough I thought. Not seeing a good reason here.
Alpha Dog - Mighty Doom? Okay thats a fair closure.
–
prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games
Chasing blockbusters is gonna fuck them up but I suppose more room in the lower weight classes isn’t bad for gamers since it lets indies and others who aren’t the big boys shine, and lord knows thats been wild over the past year’ish.
It is. Lots of “gamers” can’t be fucked learning the difference between Austin and arkane, it’s like how there’s people who think bioware Montreal is the same as Edmonton or rockstar north is the same as san Diego when north makes GTA and the other red dead. Generally gamers don’t care what studio does what just the first part of its name. Arkane Lyon are developing blade and that’s still in progress.
Arcane austin was already killed by the development of redfall. Most of the talent responsible for making dishonered and prey the games they were left during development of redfall. If arcane austin went back to making immersive sims instead of closing, it would be a new team making it, with little help from the pedegree implied by arcane’s legacy.
Keep in mind however that arcane was two studios, the main studio in lyon france, and the other in austin texas. Dishonered was developed jointly. Dishonored 2 was lyon, pray was austin, and deathloop was lyon.
The lyon studio still exists. They are continuing to make games. The only thing announced from arcane is the marvel’s blade game. Not optimistic, but arcane may still be around a while yet.
So basically they shut down their games actively being developed or games like NieR Reincarnation (I am legitimately upset they did not patch it to work offline, that was a great game that died yesterday) just so they could claim a loss. This is likely for tax reasons, if I had to guess.
You could buy it early access to give them the support (and get it cheaper) but wait for 1.0 to play it? Supposing you have the willpower I wouldn’t that is 😅
I’m definitely going to wait. I looked at the gameplay and while it does look exciting I think I’ll get turned off when it abruptly ends and have to wait another few months.
Do they offer steep discount to early buyers? I mean if I get the game at like 20% discount or something in early buy, then i would consider getting it.
Very few third-party games remain exclusive to one platform forever, so in those cases I’m usually content to just wait it out until the exclusivity deal is over then pick the game up on a platform I own. Sometimes the wait can be pretty long but I really don’t have much of a sense of FOMO most of the time.
The company said it wants to be “more selective and focused in the allocation of development resources”, and as a result of the “close examination”
Hate company gibberish like this. We plan to spend money differently… Somehow, but were planning!
Additionally Square needs to stop releasing games exclusively to a single platform, no wonder Rebirth sales haven’t been released as many (including myself) are waiting for the PC release.
Mainly waiting for PC release so I can use mods to shut Chadley up, and turn off all the anime grunting.
This is the result of a change in approach to Square Enix’s development of what it calls HD video games (PC and console, as opposed to mobile and MMO). In its note, the company said it wants to be “more selective and focused in the allocation of development resources”, and as a result of the “close examination” of its development pipeline with this in mind, is taking the multi-million dollar loss.
The next-gen update includes native applications for the consoles, Performance mode and Quality mode settings, as well as stability improvements and fixes. This means the game will be playable up to 60 frames per second and with an increased resolution.
Really stretching the definition of “next-gen” there. I’m pretty sure those have been standard for years now. But then it is Bethesda we’re talking about, still using the same hacked-up engine from Morrowind.
Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Yeah… For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn’t mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn’t be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It’s not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it’s a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The “protocol” is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn’t on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
I don’t really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn’t be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren’t.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I’m a developer. It’s work to do anything, code doesn’t grow on the LLM tree yet. That’s a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is ‘let us figure it out, just don’t sue us’. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.
ign.com
Aktywne