That sucks. The game itself was great and its Steam numbers are Concord-bad.
I'd put a lot more weight on "Ubisoft games suck because of all the MTX and games as a service stuff" if people hadn't ghosted the legitimately great zero-MTX traditional mid-sized game.
There was also a little too much game. Instead of putting in every platforming challenge that they could think of for a given set of mechanics, it would have been paced much better if they just picked their two or three best. I’ll bet it doesn’t help that it requires the Ubisoft launcher on Steam either.
Could have said that of Ori and Hollow Knight and people seem to have showed up for those. I don't think this is any worse than they are, FWIW. In any case to even notice that kind of nuance you have to play it. If that was the conversation we're having they'd be making a sequel.
The fact that it initially launched on Epic certainly didn't help its Steam numbers, but it also did much worse than Outlaws and other Ubisoft exclusives there, so the "it's the MTX/GaaS" argument doesn't hold.
Hah. Did you hear about Concord before or after it left a crater visible from space?
In any case, there are two of them, in fact, and they're both good. You may be in time to help save The Rogue Prince of Persia, which is doing even worse, but if you don't mess with Early Access, Lost Crown is still up for sale and it's pretty great.
As a company pushes people away it gets harder to pull them back, so that doesnt take away from their complaints. Also, I’m not sure that the same crowd who plays other ubisoft titles is the crowd that’s interested in a 2d platformer.
Well, it's the same crowd that plays a bunch of games that did better. The game is on the same platforms, Ubisoft or not. And all their GaaS games did much, much better on those same platforms, so yeah, it absolutely takes away from their complaints.
Outlaws may have been a bit of a disappointment and Mirage may have struggled, but Mirage had 5x the player count on its Steam relaunch than Lost Crown did. People want AssCreed and they're gonna get AssCreed forever.
I think there is some confusion here. The game genre is “2d platformer,” I wasn’t referring to where people can play it. It isn’t the most popular genre of gaming, and it’s quite different from ubisofts’ other titles.
Yeah, no, I understood it. I'm saying that there are similar 2d platformers on those same platforms (look, it's not my fault language recycles words for things) that did much, much better.
What do you even mean? Hollow Knight was a massive success, so was Bloodstained, Ori, Metroid Dread, etc. People can’t stop memeing that Silk song is not releasing because they refuse to forget about it, Ubi’s reputation is just in the gutter so to capture the audience that enjoys these games again they have to do multiple good things, not just one and give up.
Those games did well, it doesn’t mean the genre is among the most popular and i bet they didn’t approach those level of sales. I wasn’t throwing shade, that’s just facts. I also mentioned ubis or reputation adding to this.
Right. So you didn't make a difference here, since that's also true of all the Ubi games that did better than this, then.
But this doesn't have any of the other crap people are blaming for Ubi doing poorly. So you'd expect if the outrage was making a dent whatsoever their one game that is relatively clean of that stuff would have done better, not worse, than the other stuff they are putting out.
But nope, the opposite is true.
So hey, not saying you're lying, but I think the collective at least looked at the nice, small 2D metroidvania with no MTX and went "nah", but they were much more willing to give the GaaS-y stuff a try.
Although if I WAS saying you're not being all the way honest, I may guess that you just weren't on board for this anyway and now are performatively feigning outrage for something else after the fact to pretend other people's motivations are aligned with your opinions. But I'm not. So we're good.
So, one, I'm pretty sure in most cases that's not why, for the same reasons we all shared memes of people "boycotting Call of Duty" while appearing online playing Call of Duty.
But even taking everyone at their word, I'm saying the group as a whole is not working by those parameters. Directly, demonstrably in apples to apples comparisons they didn't buy the Ubisoft game that doesn't do the stuff people claim to be mad about and bought other Ubisoft games in larger numbers.
The thing with obstinance is that it's hard to make reality change its mind. Remarkably stubborn, reality.
You really don’t understand that the people who throw money at Ubi’s standard crap and people who 2d Metroidvania games are mostly different people with different values? The CoD/Fifa/Assassin Creed crowd clearly don’t give a fuck about shitty, intrusive launchers and kernel level anti-cheat.
Meanwhile, lovers of Metroidvania games looked at Prince of Persia and it’s competition (games like Nine Sols) and chose one that didn’t install malware on their computer.
I get that you want that to be true, but there is really no indication that this is the case. There are a lot of elements in Ubisoft's recent issues, but there is no good suggestion that any of that train of thought lines up with what we're seeing here.
More to the point, even if it was, all that suggests for Ubi as a course of action is to keep doing what they're doing. I mean, maybe launch on Steam day one, but... yeah, if you monetize the big games better and the fans of the small games won't cut you a break for making them... just don't make them.
No, boycotts are not a corporate death knell. No one is saying that. LITERALLY no one is saying their personal decision or reasoning is the cause of this news.
EVERYONE ks pkinting at shitty things Ubisoft does, says, it caused them to not bjy it and likely is impacting others’ decisions… then you come along going, “NUHUH NUHUH, Ubisoft isn’t losing money because YOU didn’t buy it!”
My dude… we FUCKING KNOW THAT!! We’re saying UBISOFT shot themselves in the foot with shitty behavior. This article is literally about the effects of people not buying en masse, and you’re saying that the NEWS WE ARE READING is not possible…
Just stop. Just stop. Boycotts most often do not work, but THIS IS NOT A BOYCOTT!! This is people explaining why they stopped giving Ubisoft money. Holy fuck, you are good at doubling down on a bad idea.
The point here isn't whether this game did poorly. It did. Cool.
The point here is that it did WORSE than other Ubisoft games.
Specifically, worse than Ubisoft games that include all the shitty behavior. More of the shitty behavior, in fact.
So the performance of the game is not correlated to the shitty behavior. Well, maybe more shitty behavior gets you better sales, that would fit, but I'm not going to jump to that.
You'd think if Ubisoft's shitty behavior is scaring people off this game would have done better than Mirage and Mirage better than Outcasts, but that's the opposite of what happened.
People that play games like this PoP don’t generally buy the other games Ubisoft sells. And the people that do play recent Ubisoft games are not going to play this.
That is why things like the anti cheat (for a single player game) turn people off.
This doesn't have anticheat, it has DRM software, though.
But hey, if there is no overlap, then how come this did so much worse than other similarly well liked metroidvanias, right? That's been my point here. People keep pointing out that it's not comparable to other Ubi titles. I disagree, because PoP is PoP, but let's roll with that. It also underperformed compared to other games in the same genre with similar review scores.
So what happened there? Either the Ubi woes are behind this, and then it doesn't make sense because this did worse than other more Ubisofty Ubisoft games, or they are not because different demos, and that doesn't make sense because this did much worse than similar games not from Ubisoft.
I think as far as this tells us anything is that the stink of negativity is not very fact-based when it comes to the core gaming community. That and Ubisoft may not have more money to make by going to middle sized, pure and simple high quality experiences like Rayman or this. Which sucks. Those are the best games they've made in recent years, as far as I'm concerned.
If someone says one thing and does another…people tend to trust the action, not the words. If sales numbers indicate one thing, it doesn’t matter what people say on social media.
Hollow Knight is from 2017, I don't think it was out there draining business form this seven years later. Bloodstained is more recent, and that cost the same as PoP. Also the Ori games, which are priced the same.
Plus this launched half off on Steam and nobody bought it despite being cheaper than Bloodstained and Ori.
So... I mean, it could have been that, but it pretty clearly wasn't that.
Xalavier Nelson Jr talked about this a few times over on Remap Radio.
Strange Scaffold (and many other indie studios) are literally doing what people are asking for. They are making “complete” games with no early access period and no DLC with shockingly high production values for the budget. And people are ignoring them until there is a massive sale AND still going full culture war over the stupidest of shit*. Which means it is increasingly difficult for them to secure any kind of funding even though they have an incredibly solid track record for both development and sales.
And… that is the sad reality. It has been true for decades at this point but it feels increasingly more true now. Games can’t just release “done” because people will forget they exist by the time they are willing to buy them. Look at your steam wishlist and (please don’t actually) tell me if you even remember what all of those are. Instead, people see that Caves of Qud is finally going to hit 1.0 or that Pathfinder 2 has a new DLC or that Fortnite has fucking Goku and that simultaneously reminds them that game exists AND has “new content” so that they can feel justified in being a “patient gamer”.
I can’t speak to this PoP. I know that it is a games media darling and is INCREDIBLY well done but I also tend to not want to give ubi money until yves is gone due to his role in enabling and protecting sexual misconduct which continues to this day. But it is a solid reminder of why so many major publishers refuse to do anything that is not a major franchise (and apparently Prince of Persia no longer is) or has high enough production values that it bypasses the “I’ll wait for a sale” mindset.
So… Yeah, as consumers it is not our job or responsibility to protect the people trying to sell us shit. But, if you can afford it, consider buying fewer games overall but prioritizing newer ones that actively do things you think are awesome. From a selfish standpoint, you are more likely to actually play it rather than one of the five games you got for a dollar in a fanatical bundle. But it also REALLY helps those studios to be able to report solid first quarter (or even day one) sales and many games are already launching in the 20-30 USD range anyway.
Like, I don’t know if “really well done metroidvania” is a particularly solid reason. But there is a reason all of us squad tactics sickos went crazy buying nu-xcom and the like back in the day. Because we had gone from such a lack of games that even frigging UFO: Afterlight was worth playing (it isn’t. But Aftermath or whatever the first one in that series is is the best SG-1 game ever made) to suddenly having options. And, a decade later, we have enough options that… paradox fucking murdered HBS because they weren’t pulling projected nu-xcom numbers.
*: Paraphrasing since it has been the better part of a year, but Xalavier was joking that he caught so much hell for basically parroting Swen’s stance that Larian’s BG3 was atypical and can’t be reproduced. Yet people ignored all his VERY leftist takes on economics and social justice. Although, I assume that has shifted if he is still on twitter.
I don't know the guy, but all of that sounds reasonable to me.
BG3 can be replicated, if you have a massive dormant IP that is part of a furiously resurgent franchise and have several hundred million dollars to burn in a years-long development cycle by a studio that has already done pretty much the exact same thing without a license successfully twice.
I wouldn't model my business on aligning that set of circumstances, but I sure am glad Larian did.
To be clear, there's a bunch of other AAA stuff that is also doing quite well with pretty clean, finished games. But for midsize stuff like PoP... woof, yeah, it's so hard to break through.
And you're right, it's a miserable set of incentives that if you launch broken you kinda have a built-in marketing hit because suddenly you're doing live support and adding features. No Man's Sky was a fun one for that. Cyberpunk. But those games did great at launch, so they had the built-in base to keep growing while they fixed the game. PoP launched pretty clean, was small and nobody cared, so it's no wonder Ubi has decided it can make those super talented devs do stuff on the next massive AssCreed or whatever is left of Beyond Good and Evil 2 or The Division or whatever.
They are making “complete” games with no early access period and no DLC with shockingly high production values for the budget. And people are ignoring them until there is a massive sale
I can think of several other variables that may be necessary for success that aren’t being tested in that statement. Like, is it a setting that resonates with people? Yes, I want more Max Payne, but not so much with vampires in it. Then when you find a game that gets acclaim and the audience is there for it, this is a good time to sequel that game, because now there’s brand recognition on the game people like, and they’ll be more willing to spend full price on a game where they’re confident in what they’re getting.
I just refuse to support Ubisoft. I don’t like their practices, or most of their games. I don’t feel I’m missing much by skipping whatever they make. Hopefully they go out of business and a better company can pick up their IPs and make good games, for a decent price, without crazy micro-transactions, 30 different special packs, and a required secondary launcher
Okay, but there was none of that here (except perhaps the launcher), and there was no suggestion in the results that anybody wants to encourage that. So that's definitely not the lesson being learned here.
Also, and I will keep repeating this forever, companies don't make games, people make games.
Also, also, good luck with that. Don't look now, but that's not how major companies going out of business and fire-selling their IPs tends to go.
Look, I'm not sure why it's Ubisoft's turn in the hot seat after EA and Activision, but none of that is a productive outlook or leads to a better outcome, as this one really good, really wholesome game bombing hard goes to show.
Ubisoft is in the hotseat because they let their suits have too much power over the games they produce.
I am a fan of the prince of persia series and based on the reviews I’d seen I was really interested in this title. But their absolute refusal to participate in the steam ecosystem and insistence on pushing their launcher means that I, as someone who values my own time, am not going to bother with their nonsense.
They don’t understand their customers anymore. Not well enough to shift the direction of their company’s initiatives. They deserve to fail even when they do manage to produce fun and interesting games because they are bad at the business aspects of being a game publisher/developer.
They are making progress by not delaying all of their releases on steam but man that launcher is a nuiscance.
I was too hostile to the company in my last message, honestly I used to enjoy their games. And in general I enjoy the types of games they produce. I’m a sucker for open world stuff but I stopped buying their games when they started trying to emulate the EA strategy of remaking the same game every year and inflating dlc.
I’ll happily welcome them back into my library when they drop the launcher component and lean in to steams networking features for easy coop and such.
Just the other day my buddy and I were looking for a coop open world action game with decent combat, he stumbled onto ghost recon wildlands or maybe it was the sequel but either way once we saw it was ubisoft we moved on to look for other title and ended up choosing an entirely different genre despite that being what we were looking for
Yeah, I fully agree that they've stuck to a template far too closely for far too long. That's part of why I'm frustrated that this one went as poorly as it did, since it very much isn't that.
I think the hostility to any non-Steam platform is unwarranted, although annoyance is annoyance. That said, the Ubi launcher on Steam right now is just a pop-up, I don't think it makes you log in each time if you have everything linked.
Last time I fired up a game I owned on steam that required the ubi launcher was a few years ago now and it was really bad then. Like to the point of it automatically creating a new account for me and forcibly linking it to my steam profile despite it not being the account I already had with ubisoft from a registration I had created on an Xbox console previously. It permanently divided my library between multiple ubisoft logins and made accessing the right one really annoying. Their support wouldn’t let me refund or even migrate the title to the correct account and they made it an even further inconvenience by not letting me unlink my steam profile from my (wrong) ubisoft profile without writing in a physical letter for some stupid reason. Something to do with purchase history not overlapping with the steam profile or honestly I don’t even remember anymore but it was more than enough to no longer want to do business with them.
If it’s improved to the point that it’s just a pop-up I’d be willing to consider them again. I really don’t want to support ubisoft themselves but I’d love to support Prince of Persia games. If any other studio owned the IP I would have bought it on release day
Yeah, so I just checked, it brings up a Ubisoft Connect windows and then boots. It has less of a launcher than, say, Baldur's Gate 3.
I don't know if it makes you log in the first time or it creates a new thing for you by default, but I can tell you I had more account and launcher trouble running Warframe on a new PC this week than I did playing any recent Ubisoft game.
BTW, you can link up your Steam account to Warframe now and not have to log in each time and man, that only took a decade. Still didn't piss people off as much as Ubisoft being on Epic, though.
i have a theory about some games not being popular/successful because of the lack of word of mouth and anti-Piracy measures being the reason, maybe someone already made a study on this
Not to my knowledge, but I bet not being on Steam had more to do with it than Denuvo, by far. There is no indication that DRM software discourages sales, to my knowledge. If it does, at worst it breaks even.
I will buy the DRM-free option every time, but every piece of data out there suggests that "I will never play a game with Denuvo" people vastly overestimate how much of a practical impact that stance has.
Me, I'm just weirded out that people are so mad about some solutions they know but not about Steam DRM or any other solution that isn't known widely by name. You know, since I'm sharing all my unpopular gaming hot takes here.
I mean, there are worse areas to run based on gut checks. Ultimately you buy whatever brands make you feel warm and cozy. But just so we're clear, Steam is the granddaddy of both PC DRM and digital distribution with no ownership.
I get thinking their implementation is better, but I don't know that I get "well, this one I actively root for, that one I consider a boycott-worthy deal breaker".
Well, brand and image are relevant, in more ways than direct sales impact (something that "voting with your wallet" often ignores).
But mostly, and this is important, it's worth remembering that Denuvo's clients aren't the people who buy their games, they are the people who sell the games. That's who Denuvo is selling to. And Denuvo, which is a very big, if not the only, name in town for effective DRM on PC, would like to keep being that.
All else being equal, if Denuvo generates negativity in forums and a similar no-name competitor doesn't a client (that's a publisher, not a buyer of the game), may choose to go with the newcomer just to remove the noise, or to prevent an impact on sales they can't verify.
But also, I imagine people working at Denuvo are kind of over being the random boogeyman of gaming du jour while other DRM providers are actively praised or ignored. I'd consider speaking up, too.
I probably wouldn't because there's very little to be gained from that, as this conversation proves, but... you know, I'd consider it.
EDIT: Oh, hey, I hadn't noticed, but the guy actually responds to this explicitly. Pretty much along these lines, actually:
RPS: A lot of companies seem happy enough with the service Denuvo provides to keep using it. Why are you so concerned about public perception? Why not just let people have their theories and carry on doing your thing?
Andreas Ullmann: Hard to answer. So maybe it's just… maybe it's even a personal thing. I'm with the company for such a long time. The guys here are like my family, because a lot of the others here are also here for ages. It just hurts to see what's posted out there about us, even though it has been claimed wrong for hundreds of times.
On the other hand, I can imagine that this reputation also has some kind of business impact. I can imagine that certain developers, probably more in the indie region or the smaller region, are not contacting us in the first place if they are looking for solutions.
Because currently, there is only two ways to protect a game against piracy, right? Either you don't, or use our protection. There is no competitor. And I can imagine that there are developers out there who are hesitant to contact us, only because of the reputation. They would probably love to prevent piracy for their game, but they fear the hate and the toxicity of the community if they do so. And maybe they even believe all the claims that are out there - unanswered from us until today - and for this reason don't contact us in the first place.
They could be your favourite football team, too, that still doesn’t fill me with confidence on their level of preparation for this.
Bloodlines was an extremely ambitious mix of immersive sim and RPG, in the same vein as early Deus Ex, TCR’s most gameplay heavy game has an ineffective monster that takes several seconds to kill you and myst style puzzles.
Lately I bought a lot of AAA Games from the past couple year’s for 12€ up to 20€. It is such a better experience. They work (almost bug free) and you get 30+ Hours out of them on the first run. And when you only get 10 Hours or so out of them and don’t feel like investing more time into them, I tend to not have the big buyers remorse effect like with games that cost up to 100€ plus 20€ every other month or so for the next DLC/Battle Pass that should just have been an update or part of the main game from the start.
I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it’s always there on the store page.
Hot take: Alan Wake 2 would have a lot of explaining to do if EPIC had a review system. My disappointment with that game was immeasurable and my weekend was ruined.
Hmm, I haven’t played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I’m childhood friends with one of the devs). So I’m curious, what’s the problem? I’ve heard like three people say that it’s their game of the year already, so I’m curious what’s the issue for you?
I’d love to hear why, personally. Wasn’t a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard’s game get mixed reviews. They didn’t release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.
Landing on the boring planets wasn’t my problem with the boring game.
The ground combat was terrible. The space flight was terrible. The space combat was terrible. And it was wedged into every activity for no reason other than lazy design to pad things.
And then there was the UI…
You can’t “feel small” when the game makes you a fiddly murder hobo in the tutorial.
Being limited by the DnD system makes sense. DOS2 had a lot of cool mechanics not present in BG3. I do hope we see another DnD game from them eventually.
Yeah the DnD mevhanics are weird for me coming from DOS2..
I really miss elements mixing and having to focus on elements in general. And those weird 'Long Rest' things.. kinda annoying for me.
Yeah I felt like DOS2 had really improved on the already good formula that was DOS, and BG3 using the DnD system felt like a big step back. It’s still a great game, but I feel like it is in spite of the DND systems (not the setting), not because of it. DND doesn’t feel suited for the computer, it really fits better on the tabletop.
As someone who’s played their fair share of assorted DnD systems, 5E has a number of issues that really hold it back. For instance, you’re not really supposed to long rest between every fight, but how do you tell players that without a proper DM? It’s a very weak mechanic that’s apparently too iconic to have just axed.
Don’t get me wrong, 5E works better at what it’s supposed to - easily accessible and relatively low math tabletop roleplay. But a computer can do so much more.
Lots of RPGs allow rest cheesing. Even if you don’t let players rest in random locations like BG3 does, the players can always hoof it back to town to rest. Attempts to prevent this kind of cheesing often end up feeling unduly punishing and un-fun. It’s not a tabletop vs computer issue.
D&D 5e is kind of bad system. It’s “good” in that it’s hard to make a bad character, and it’s popular, but that’s most of what it has going for it. It’s missing a lot of rules you’d want for a general purpose RPG. Centering it on rests only works in rather specific kinds of games. The magic system is very bespoke and thus clunky. The dice math if 1d20+stuff gives you a flat probability, which is often unsatisfying.
Pathfinder 2e is widely considered better than 5e in every way, unless you actually specifically want the simple+shallowness of 5e. Which is a fine thing to want, but that is a pretty big trade off. If you were just playing with friends, you’d probably be better off with Fate or maybe a PbtA game if you want simple narrative stuff, or Gloomhaven if you just want a board game.
I find Pathfinder 2e (and D&D 3e before it) way clunkier. Maintaining a level-appropriate power level requires stacking buffs like the Overlord meme, and if you decline to do so, you’re just crippling your character. It’s bad enough that auto-buffing mods are considered mandatory for the Pathfinder CRPGs.
I don’t like of the dices but BG3 sucked my way more in than DOS2 so I how they really manage to combine the best of both in their next game. Let’s hope the expectations don’t get too high.
I think making something on par with BG3 will be incredibly tough. Wouldn’t mind seeing them branch out and try something new again. Larian has done a bunch of different stuff before. A modern take on Ego Draconis would be really cool.
I won’t fight you over that, I think they were good too. I’d love a modern third-person ARPG in the Divinity universe. The “build your own ghoul” mechanic was really fun, and obviously turning into a fucking dragon was epic too.
DOS2 fights felt much more like a slog than BG3. Especially in higher difficulties, every battlefield ended up a nightmarish soup of elemental surfaces, which got old after awhile. I also found whittling down enemy toughness bars un-fun.
Personally, I liked both the BG3 and DOS1 systems better than DOS2.
Well yeah, but the surfaces were DOS2 “thing”. They are present in BG3 too, just not as important to the overall gameplay. It doesn’t reflect badly on any future Divinity games, since they have proven they can use surfaces and have it not be overwhelming.
I actually want them to step away from 5e/DnD in general. I loved DOS2, but I agree with another commenter that the vast swaths of elements made things challenging in a frustrating way at times. Not that that shouldn’t be a tactic to be used, but it definitely was egregious in DOS2.
5E is just… A fuckin mess when it comes to balancing the game - said as a long time DM and player. There are so many things that just irritate the heck out of me with the system that can’t necessarily be balanced with a video game slapped overtop of it. (Not to say Larian didn’t do a good job with what they were given, but still)
That being said, I am a total fanboy of Pathfinder 2e and the way things are balanced there, and I would love love love to see a CRPG under those rules. Especially if it was Larian-levels.
I don’t know why everyone is so angry at this comment. The question was about what will it take for subscriptions to increase and become dominant in industry, the guy answered that. The interview was with the guy about Ubisoft’s subscription service, what else people expected?
If anyone talks to the guy in-charge of Gamepass, and they ask them how will gamepass increase, they wont’ say, well, if everyone keeps buying physical, that will be great for us.
I think the Ubisoft guy is pushing for subscriptions when a lot of people are not keen. See any of the recent articles about NatGeo pulling videos from Sony, etc etc.
As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don’t lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That’s not been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
First of all, not here to defend Ubisoft, I completely agree about not trusting them to do what’s good for gamers.
So, my point was, everything said in this interview, is pretty much same thing you will hear from any “head of subscription” of any company. I think MS is currently the most aggressive one, with their Gamepass. Keep in mind this interview is specifically about their subscription service, and the changes they made it isn’t about anything else. Sony is currently (or well last I read about it) most defensive with subscription, often talking about how it’s bad for the industry, but if you ask whoever is incharge of PS+, and ask them, what needs to happen before subscription will really take off, he would probably say the same thing.
As for closing down of online servers, it’s always sad when that happens. That’s a valid reason to blame a company, but pretty much all companies do that. As a patient gamer, I don’t even remember how many times I have come across a game where I would find out you can’t get all trophies because online servers have shut down. So, all companies should be blamed for this.
So many people framed Activision as the bad guy, when we are seeing that they actually staved off some idiotic decisions on Bungie’s part. I have a feeling that while the layoffs are awful, I look at other studios run by Sony and can’t help but wonder if the real issue was just at the local management level, and Sony’s intervention is maybe needed to save Bungie from itself. Pete Parsons is a piece of shit fuckhead.
Do they have any other option than to stick to their guns on this one? That’s sold the XBox Series S as having feature parity with the Series X. If they go against that now, then they’ve engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine, plus all the negative PR that comes from it.
They’re stuck until the next console generation, which is a long way out. And I wonder if PS5 will continue to gain ground against XBox for the rest of the generation as a result.
It will be interesting to see if they continue with their two-model tiering next gen, but I’m guessing they won’t.
Having just looked up the equivalent PC specs, it really doesn’t seem like a lot of power.
I imagine the game can run “fine”, but they probably need to do a fair bit of optimisation or people will complain about the way it looks and frame rate.
One of the benefits consoles used to have was everyone running the same hardware, but they’ve lost that now and I don’t imagine console players will be as accepting of lower quality as PC players with low end GPUs.
The main issue, and what’s keeping Baldur’s Gate off it, is a RAM issue. It’s got less RAM that the One, and things like dual screen need more RAM than the S has.
Most of time, it’s the juggle of time and resource available to you, but there is still a hard limit otherwise how about demand BG3 to also run on my antique knockoff NES? Cause they are too lazy to accommodate the hardware limitation? How about my smart watch? Or someone else’s smart fridge?
Don’t get me wrong, what you said in some cases but most likely the devs are told to push it out instead of make the game run better(on the target platforms.) There are no secret sauce to otherwise fit a game like BG3 to previous gen consoles.
Last, if you are really good at this optimization thing the whole industry will pay good money for your skill set.
From what they’ve said the game can run fine, but the issue is getting local split screen on the S working because it has such a small amount of RAM available
It’s just a business decision. Enough players have strong enough hardware that the invest into optimizing for weaker hardware isn’t likely to pay off.
If there is a weaker platform with lots of players, like the Switch, that can make optimizing financially viable, but obviously, it depends on how much optimizing you would have to do…
If they go against that now, then they’ve engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine,
No they won’t. Companies aren’t beholden to their commitments from advertisements in perpetuity. In the first place, someone would need to sue, or begin a class action. That’d drag out for years, and almost certainly lose.
I’d be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.
On the other hand, feature parity means that the full potential of the X because everything also has to run on the S. So all the things that the X can do that the S can’t will, probably, not be used much, if at all, going forward, just to avoid this kind of hassle.
Great deal for people who bought the S, but sucks shit for people who paid a couple hundred bucks more for the X, for features that simply won’t be utilized.
Since these Xbox consoles came out, maybe even since Xbox One X, they've been talking about being "beyond generations". I figured that would result in more periodic updates, probably with two simultaneous lines of Xboxes, X and S, but it hasn't turned out that way. So far, it's just seemed to mean that you don't have to deal with Sony's BS around PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game.
They should’ve figured out a way to communicate that the Series S will last until next gen, but the Series X would get more cross-gen games when next gen launches
Or they should’ve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they could’ve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol
But I’m actually a believer that BG3 could be made to run on XSS even with split screen, it’s just gonna take more work and reduced graphics maybe audio quality too, and smarter data streaming from the SSD
Or they should’ve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they could’ve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol
They really should have. It’s got 2Gb less than the One, which is where all these problems are coming from.
And as for getting BG3 running on the S, well, Microsoft has had to send out some of their engineers to help Larian figure out how to do it, so I doubt it’s going to be an easy job.
Wasn’t the general idea that direct storage means data moves from the SDD to the GPU skipping RAM, hence the need for less. It’s possible Larian aren’t used to dealing with direct storage since the PC doesn’t have it in most systems even now and so just brute forced things the old way on PS5? That’s why MS engineers have to go and show them how to use the new architecture.
On PC, the point is that you can skip RAM and go straight to VRAM. You still need the assets in memory while you use them. It's faster but it's not that much faster. With unified memory there isn't that distinction. That's one of the ways consoles can be better optimized than a general PC build.
The Series S will become an ever bigger anchor going forward. Eventually, there will be 3rd party games that just choose not to bother with the Xbox at all because of the Series S.
We’re only a few years into the new console generation and problems are also starting. It’s definitely going to get worse as more demanding games start coming out. Microsoft is really going to have to loosen their parity policy, or it’s going to hold either the entire generation back or them back.
Given that there’s plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S they still need to scale their game for, I doubt it will be as big an issue as people make out. BG3 is an odd outlier as they’ve put a splitscreenode in the console game that the PC version doesn’t have and that’s what’s holding things up.
Given that there’s plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S
Not when it comes to memory. The Xbox SS only has 10GB combined system memory and VRAM. The PC version of BG3 requires 8GB system memory plus 4GB of VRAM, so the SS is a couple gigabytes short in total.
Going by the Steam hardware survey, 95% of PCs have at least 8GB of system memory, with 16GB being easily the most common amount. 80% have at least 4GB of VRAM, with 8GB being the most common amount.
For obvious reasons I can’t post it publicly before MS discloses it. They are currently migrating more and more GDK docs to the public site, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the link became publicly available soon, but currently one still needs to register a dev account to access it.
ign.com
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