I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…
…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.
These people have literally zero self awareness.
They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.
Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.
Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:
And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.
Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, who you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…
So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?
Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?
What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?
To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:
You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.
All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.
Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.
Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.
When your predecessor was Don Mattrick, it’s not like you have to perform that great to be better.
They need Peter Moore back, he’s the only leader of Xbox/Microsoft Games that’s ever been any good - he took Xbox from zero to its peak golden age, then he left and we got the dark age of Kinect.
Yes they do with patch 7, which will be out this week for PC and has been delayed for consoles and mac. Bear in mind though that it will only be a handful of mods, not the entire mod scene that will be available on consoles.
In March, Vincke announced the studio’s plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won’t be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision.
Genuinely sad to hear, as WotC has a ton of rich properties that a studio like Larian could have brought to vivid life. Would love to have a Larian treatment of the MtG Multiverse or a rendition of the Dragonlance series or setting.
Excited to see what they do next, but its a shame to see these companies part ways.
I‘m happy they got out to work on something better and less restraining. There‘s already a lot in their Original Sins games that couldn‘t be brought over to BG3 but I‘d love to see return in future games and there‘s so much more to come on top of that.
Considering that Vincke (or another person from Larian) has stated that everyone from WotC they worked with has now been laid off despite the huge success of BG3, I’m glad Larian are focusing on their own IP instead of bringing in money for WotC/Hasbro.
I mean considering the last mainstream headline I remember about WotC is them sending the Pinkertons to chase after a random streamer because they fucked up and sent him unrevealed cards for MtG, I think they are a really bad company and I pray for their downfall, so someone else picks up the IP and runs with it.
I mean the layoffs are bad as well but there’s a non-exhaustive list of reasons to not like WotC and to not be associated with them.
It’s a shame they never gonna bother with DLC, I had at least hoped that they’d add in the parts from the endgame that they scrapped. Supposedly there was an entire Upper City part which they scrapped. I think it included the vampire castle, which they moved and is why it’s in such a weird spot in the Lower City now.
The mod for artificer is excellent! It’s a touch unbalanced, especially if you take the correct infusion, but overall I had a ton of fun with it last playthrough!
Do be aware that if you go Battle Smith, the “upgraded” robot you get in act 3 doesn’t auto navigate well. We’d get across the map and he’d still be chilling at the blushing mermaid. The basic robot also struggles on navigation, but not nearly as badly
I had some really, really poor experiences with Act 3, and it was only later that I learned 90% of my issues were direct results of the Upper City being scrapped.
Karlach, Gortash, Wyll’s father and Cazador are perhaps the biggest cases of this, with their stories feeling incomplete, buggy (at launch), and painfully linear relative to almost every other plot point in the game. In almost every case it’s because a series of their events, triggers and event flags were placed in or tied to the upper city, and the events needed to be replaced, rewritten, and reflagged in something of a hurry.
Larian is a great studio, and they’ve made some of my favorite modern games, but they do this with every release. I’m a little disappointed that this is the one time they’re not going back and “finishing” the final act a year later, the way they did with Original Sin 1 and 2. I won’t quite say I’ve been burnt by the purchase, or that the game is currently unfinished or doesn’t deserve the praise it gets, but seeing what the game could and should have been is a bad aftertaste after an otherwise mostly satisfying meal.
Completely agreed with all your points. Act 3 soured me on the game quite dramatically after being pretty high on it after the first two acts, and my only consolation (especially having also read that Steam page guide to cut content) was Larian’s habit of releasing Definitive Editions of their games.
I also can’t blame them for ditching WotC ASAP. Their legacy properties feel like pump and dumps lately. Take a look at how many magic sets released in 2010 compared to today. Then their reportedly “backwards compatible” 5.5e isn’t gonna be backwards compatible at all, and despite a decade of feedback, they still managed to fuck up more than one class completely. Bank of America dropped their ass for extreme product fatigue.
I wouldn’t want to bet my company’s future on WotC. I wouldn’t want to bet my worst enemy’s future on WotC’s.
Fucking Amen. Again, I am disappointed, but it is a great game in its current form and, particularly because WotC is involved, I do not blame them at all for their decisions regarding BG3.
Right?! Watching it get worldwide acclaim was this strange experience, because Act 3 was nearly unplayable. Meanwhile, Acts 1 and 2 were such masterpieces that it’s hard to call the game anything other than amazing. Criticizism felt misplaced, but the widespread acclaim it received was toom
I am glad it is a much more polished, finished feeling game now, and we can look back at it as the standard games should be held to, moving forward, but I’ll still be disappointed in the way we failed to get what was initially planned.
There were some major bugs, but none of them completely ruined my gameplay. I guess some people did have their gameplay ruined, and that really sucks. Overall I absolutely loved the game, even with the bugs. It’s the best game I’ve ever played, and the only game I’ve played start to finish more than once. What’s really neat is that I was still discovering new things on my 3rd playthrough, and each time felt very different.
I really wish they were given more time for this game. It was amazing, but now that I know what they cut I keep feeling regret over not having so much more content.
There’s so much Baldur’s Gate 3 there already. If you never cut anything, the game is never “finished”. I think they made the right call. I’d like to see what they’ve got in them next. Perhaps a CRPG with a Starfield-esque setting. Most CRPGs lean on the post-apocalypse sorts of settings.
True, I guess. But I know they had intentionally cut the story and change a few things as a result of that. I guess it’s partly because I just want more.
The only thing I can think of to make 6 even better is if it used 5’s job system. 5 single handedly killed having static classes for the characters for me. I want to be able to make anyone anything if they’re not going to straight up let me make my own character.
I totally agreed when I was younger but over the years I’ve grown to appreciate when the game makes me play a “suboptimal” class/job. I learn to love some of the quirky characters because they make me try them.
When I’m given all the jobs I compulsively try to level them all because I’m broken that way.
Damn. I finally got around to reading the article. That’s a hell of a story.
I can believe either main possibility though. It’s possible the dude just has a type, and a lot of really strange coincidence in his life. Unlikely that so many perfect coincidences exist, but not totally impossible (I’ve seen some weird shit in my fifty years).
It’s also totally believable that someone would create alternate identities for any number of reasons, some of which aren’t necessarily bad, though the degree to which it went is out of line if that’s the case. But I kinda doubt it was done fully benignly if that’s what the truth is.
And, I guess there’s always the possibility of a mix of those, with one or more of the three dubious people being real, and the rest fake.
But dude nuking everything online is super suspicious.
Kefka. That’s why. He is the only villain to win by losing. He got what he wanted and drove everyone into his hand. He is by far the most cerebral villain in the franchise. So many stories leave out that having a phenomenal big bad is what makes a hero a better hero.
I’ve been thinking about this while I switch back and forth playing Elden Ring’s DLC and Infinite Wealth.
In Elden Ring my motivation is simply that they are in the way and I want to go through them. The excitement of defeating someone is only strengthened by how many times I didn’t before I finally do.
Infinite Wealth, on the other hand, introduces complete assholes you want to beat up and then you get to. Which is just way more cathartic and the build up is always going to be the same for nearly every player, because the bad guy is actually shown doing shit most people hate so you start to actually hate them and want to defeat them.
I agree and could have told them this a decade ago.
I seriously wanted them to remake ff6 in the same style that ethra is being made in. I was not a fan of ff7 and beyond, and seriously stopped caring about FF series from ff11 onwards. None of them felt like final fantasy.
FFVIII had those gun swords that had no gun functionality whatsoever. I kept thinking “this will be the upgrade that lets me shoot the gun, or launch the blade, or supercharge the blade with an explosive hit, or something to justify the fact that the handle is a revolver.” Each successive upgrade, it increased my expectations that the gun function would be awesome, because otherwise it would have been an earlier upgrade.
No, I’m replaying 8 via the mobile remaster right now and that is what you can do and how the game essentially explains why it happens. It only works with Squall and Seifer as well.
No surprise it’s FF VI. Absolutely peak final fantasy. Classic Uematsu soundtrack, great story with an iconic villain and a lovable cast. Active Time Battles and a phenomenal Esper system for customization. Square at the height of their pixel art powers with some beautiful sprites. Ultros, the opera scene, train suplexing…
It’s a shame they kind of butchered the pixel remaster. I’d try playing a romhack version on an emulator if you’re interested, preferably something based on Woolsey’s wonderful translation (son of a submariner!).
I recommend Woolsey Uncensored, I think it’s a really strong translation that combines the best of all worlds. The Dancing Mad mod was also recommended to me recently as a way to add uncompressed, higher quality music samples. I don’t have any experience using it, but it looks like it should work on top of Woolsey Uncensored. Your mileage may vary, though.
It’s not as bad as the mobile version from 2014 (seriously, go look it up if you don’t believe me!), but I still prefer the original art and sprites. Butchered is maybe too strong a word though, that’s more fair to say about the mobile version.
EDIT: forgot to mention they used the GBA translation as a base and discarded many iconic Woolsey lines from the original, like “son of a submariner!”. There are obviously a lot more changes but I’m not going to be full purist and claim everything was objectively better on the SNES just because that’s the version I’m used to. You can look at the full differences here.
The beauty of Final Fantasy is that, with each entry being different from the others, every game of the series ends up resonating differently with different people.
The “best” Final Fantasy varies greatly depending on who you ask, for a combination of factors, including nostalgia and subjective opinions on the different aspects of the game (story, characters, gameplay).
It’s what I love about this series. You may play ten games, but the eleventh will still surprise you in some way. Even if I don’t like a specific entry, I can still appreciate that they tried something new and unique, and I always look forward to playing the next one.
There’s no doubt about this. My favourites in the franchise usually differ from other people and fans that I know. It really does make it a pleasure being a fan of Final Fantasy as it holds such a diverse fandom that conversations often hold interesting takes, views and more.
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