This seems fine. I don’t understand the desire to have an overarching chronology anyway. It’s pretty clear each game is its own world with little connection to the other series beyond recycling some of the same concepts.
It makes more sense lore-wise to just think of them as entirely separate universes with some direct sequels. Majora’s Mask is a direct sequel that takes place in a canonically different dimension anyway so they already introduced the concept.
It’s interesting in the same way people pieced together a story for all of the Pixar movies. But they are just fan theories that are kinda interesting.
The majority if the reason it’s significant is that Nintendo MADE it significant, by releasing that “official” timeline tying all the gamrs together. Then, the made BotW with a whole bunch of direct and indirect references to this timeline, and events in previous games. Then TotK threw pretty much all of that in the garbage.
Honestly, this behavior of responding to player feedback and arguing about how “it’s just because you didn’t play the game right!” is kinda unhinged.
It also, to me, really takes Bethesda’s mask off and reveals what their culture must be as a company. Based on these responses, they seem so convinced that they shit gold that they’ve stopped entertaining feedback or trying to innovate much in their games much at all. Kinda confirms some of the criticism I’ve seen of them since Fallout 4 and 76 came out.
It seems to me like someone in the PR department decided they needed to “try something new,” and then didn’t actually run the idea by anyone who could say this is a stupid plan. Someone on the community management team got a promotion and thought it was time to make a bold move, and they were absolutely wrong.
Good, maybe now prices for them will finally come back down to reality. $500 for a switch is bonkers and $800 for an Xbox of any variety is outright criminal.
They’re too greedy to let things go at cost now, they know parents and fans will get it anyway. Look at parking alone for disney world, like $175.
Greed has ruined companies. Nintendo won’t sell bubble bobble for NES, I have to find a used cartridge or do without. They don’t sell nor support it. So I use a rom and they cry about that. They don’t get it both ways, fuck Nintendo. I’ll never stop seeding/sharing my massive rom collection, switch games included.
The funny thing about Disney, and believe me, I don’t want to defend them here, is that they’ve found ways to admit and fit far more people into the park as demand rose for a thing that inherently has fixed supply. More or less the same thing is happening with GPUs and memory right now as AI demand is sucking up so much supply and they can’t be produced any faster. The supply can’t increase, so the prices go up. They have to. Nintendo and Sony both know they stand to make more money after the fact if they sell you a cheaper console, but they can’t lose $200 per unit either, or there’s very little chance they make a profit on it ever.
Unless you have insider information/proof, this is just speculation and I don’t believe it based on their past greedy little money grabs. They’re going to milk it until everyone has one. There are people who have multiple switch 1s, different switches for certain games, colors, modded ones, customized ones. The list goes on. The goal is to extract money from your account to theirs any way possible.
I mean, $7/month just to backup your games. Why is there no local way to copy a fucking file?
As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.
Insider information of what? Increases for memory and GPUs are covered by basically every news outlet that covers tech right now. That $7 to copy a file is exactly why they’d want to get a Switch into your home for cheaper if they could. You get multiple Switches in the same home by making it accessibly priced, and Nintendo knows that. Walled gardens suck, and that’s where their money is made. Right now, Nintendo is absorbing some extra costs above and beyond where they expected (like tariffs) by charging more for accessories rather than raising the price of the base unit, but there’s a good chance they lose their stomach for keeping the Switch 2 price where it is as we run into more of these supply issues.
As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.
Even ignoring the fact that cars and parking them is about the least efficient use of land you can have, the only alternative is that they keep prices low but then there’s a lottery or a waiting list to get in. No secret as to why prices just went up.
We all want things to cost less, but as adults, there are realities to acknowledge as to why they can’t. I never said they’re not making profit on their hardware, but their actions (announcing prices and then raising them above their competitors after tariffs were revealed) indicate that their margins are probably not very high; marketing one price and then changing it is a tangible expense that companies don’t like to do if they don’t have to. This report that we’re commenting on shows that even being the only new console this year is not enough to make it a hot holiday item.
Consoles are normally sold at a loss if I remember correctly. Companies tend to bet on people buying enough games to make up the difference, because generally people do. Most people aren’t sitting on a console with only 3 or 4 games for it.
Switch 2 has a much healthier margin than Switch. Nintendo is actually making money on the hardware this time. They don’t have the lineup or the services to justify the hardware being a loss leader and won’t until probably 2027.
Here’s to hoping the Steam Machine is $799 or less.
The principal of supply and demand still applies, they will cut prices up until the point they either go out of business or they find a sufficient number of buyers.
Companies like Nvidia, Micron and Samsung are currently chasing massive profits off enterprise customers, but will come crawling back to consumers once the AI bubble bursts (assuming they survive the resulting market collapse).
As an example, if Nvidia can turn one TSMC wafter into one AI accelerator that they can sell for $40K, or into ~5 RTX 5090s they can sell for $2K/ea - they will sell as many of the $40K cards as they can, and only use failed wafers to try and satiate RTX 5090 demand.
But if there are no more AI customers, they will be forced to drop prices in order to shift more volume. If they can’t drop prices further due to wafer costs, then they will pass up wafer allocations from TSMC.
If TSMC sees too many wafers free up - they will be forced to drop prices to all customers (AMD, Apple etc.) to try and pick up the slack. They in turn will need to drop prices in order to try and increase sales volumes.
This will have a downwards pressure on prices and a “return to the mean” moment for tech prices. It will just be a painful couple of years until we get to that point, and honestly with the way things are currently going - it will be the least of our worries.
You think prices will fall now that there are giant new capable data centers everywhere? AAA Gaming will become synonymous with cloud gaming and the hardware to run games at home won‘t be produced anymore. They’ll build even more data centers instead. It‘s a much more useful business model to establish tech feudalism for the overly rich.
Data centres aren’t run by hardware manufacturers. When Nvidia/Micron/Samsung run out of enterprise corporations to bilge funds out of, they will return back to selling to consumers.
Does this mean that things will 100% return to how they were in the ‘Before Times’? No, let’s be real - the surplus of under-used data centres will definitely result in a push towards cloud gaming, online experiences and the like - but in an ideal scenario we would end up with more choice and not less.
But again, this all hinges on the current AI bubble bursting in the near future - followed by a pretty bad recession/depression.
I don’t think its necessarily the prices that are the issue but what you’re getting for it. Games have historically not kept up with inflation and still cost less than what we were paying for SNES carts in the 90s, but now they’re the 15th sequel of some franchise and are only half finished so there isn’t much draw for customers.
Good old Trainwiz. Pretty sure the mad bastard used to frequent 4chan’s Elder Scrolls modding threads, so I’m kind of impressed at the restraint of his response.
And development teams are too big. No game should realistically be having 500+ people working on it. That’s too many people, too big a ship to steer fast enough for the changes that happen in game development. Even the biggest games have done very well with teams of 250 or less, including all staff that work on the game, how about development studios pay attention to that?
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Drag can think of one counterexample: Warframe. But Warframe is also 100% free to play and free to participate in every content update and event. And Warframe is developed by an indie team from Fake London who started the game with 120 employees.
Warframe feels just as riddled though with all of its different kinds of currencies and crafting mechanics. It may not have an egregious mtx model but the game loop around it still feels like it’s meant to. I much more enjoyed the game in beta when it was simpler. I go on it now and I haven’t got a fucking clue what to do, fumble around for an hour and just decide to play something else instead.
Warframe is much more fun with friends. Friends will tell you that you don’t have to bother with all the currencies. You can just do the story missions.
Oh, good news for you. They just released an update two days ago that separates the quests in the codex into story, side, and warframe quests. DE listened to player feedback and fixed the problem. Now you go to the codex terminal, you click on story quests, and it tells you what to do next.
Who is these people that want this? And even if they do. Creating a good game does not need 500 people. And if you want to provide content after setup several small parallel teams to make cosmetics and stuff.
But the whole live service is something the companies want. So they can keep monetizing it and turn if off once a new iteration is done.
It’s like they exist in an alternate reality. But then I’m fine with that too. If there is a market for that… just a shame that the hunt for this audience eats up everything else.
Another way to look at it is that the multiplayer market is the only pool of money big enough to support games at that level.
Maybe if single player gamers would be accepting of feature scopes from 10-15 years ago, there’d be a stable niche for single player games.
I’m in my 40s and only get enjoyment from multiplayer games. Single player just dries up for me in terms of dopamine release.
When I was in my 20s I was unsocial, heavily autistic, couldn’t stand multiplayer because I didn’t control the variables.
Basically, my wallet and my brain followed a coupled pair of paths. The version of me with more money has more need for other people in my games.
I have more tolerance for other people. But also I’m more lonely in life. Used to be, games were a refuge from the other people I was constantly surrounded by in school, college, roommate situations. I could just go be alone and have fun, and I needed to be alone.
And that was when I was broke.
Now, I have more money, and I crave social contact. I live alone, don’t have constant social overwhelm any longer. Games aren’t my refuge of solitude any more. Now they’re a way to feel other people without having to go out my front door.
I’m not made of money, but I can afford games now.
Probably a connection there.
My main thesis though is just that maybe the world of multiplayer gaming just has more money in it period. Maybe it’s only the world of multiplayer gaming that can actually support AAA games’ budgets.
15 years ago, no game had a budget with the same orders of magnitude we see these days. Also, 15 years ago the oldest gamer demographics were 15 years younger.
Which brings me back to my original point: maybe it’s not that the multiplayer games are somehow nullifying the market for AAA single player games; maybe it’s just that no such market ever existed. That the multiplayer market is a new market that didn’t exist 15 years ago, not a transformation of an existing market.
For me at least the correlation is that me having this kind of gaming budget is correlated with me having overall social isolation more than overall social overwhelm like I did in my twenties.
I’ve worked on a team of 12 at one point and I remember that being a pain to organize. Not that I was the one doing the organization mind you but it just seemed like it was a nightmare.
Crazy stuff… Ads everywhere. Makes my choice to not buy any console this generation seem a lot better. It saved me money and I don’t get ads forced on me. I call that a win win.
At this point, the distinction between console and PC comes down to the corporate side. The PS4 and PS5 operating systems are based on a BSD (probably FreeBSD but not sure), and are capable of running a desktop OS (as long as hackers find a way to bypass Sony’s locked-down firmware). XBox One and Series use a Windows-based OS, also locked down by Microsoft to only run the applications they want.
Everything about the Steam Deck is designed with gaming in mind, but in terms of capabilities, it’s no different from a PC. You could hook it up to a USB-C dock and use it for work. I’d sooner call it a handheld PC than a console.
I would argue that it’s a handheld PC since it’s not locked down to heck and back. It would also be the one thing I would buy but I have no use case for it so I don’t.
Yeah, same. If I were going to get a handheld console, it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want, but…I really don’t need another portable computing device.
Yes and no: they were bought by Bayer 5 years ago, so they don’t exist under that name anymore, but I don’t know how much of their worst bullshit they’re still doing under the new name.
For example, I was unable to confirm or rule out whether they’re still doing the suicide crops and food DRM bullshit as Bayer or not…
As a farmer Monsanto has done a lot of sketchy stuff, but I’d like to point out that “terminator crops” actually have a legitimate usage case. There’s few worse weeds than volunteer herbicide-resistant canola, and if it just didn’t come up next year it would be great.
Almost all modern crops are hybrids anyways which don’t breed true. Nobody is saving seed except in very specific cases and even small farmers aren’t even planting bin-run wheat as modern genetics outperform it so greatly.
If you want to save seed there are plenty of open-pollinated varieties out there but unfortunately most of them perform poorly compared to their modern hybrid counterparts, from field crops to garden vegetables.
Imagine you just finished playing Arkham Knight, and you get an interview with Rocksteady as a game developer. They love you, your passion, your creative skills, and they onboard you. This “game” is what Warner Bros hands down to you to work on. The well-known head of the studio leaves within a few years of you joining. You hold out hope that everything will come together so people can enjoy the art that you’ve worked so hard on. Warner Bros adds a battle pass. Warner Bros makes it a “game”-as-a-service. Warner Bros announces nonsensical lore additions for the sake of post-launch content. Warner Bros denies review copies. The “studio” you thought you were signing up for has become nothing but a slot machine for the higher-ups.
What a shitty thing to do to a whole group of wonderfully creative and skilled people.
See, this is the thing people don’t realize when they think generative AI is going to reduce headcounts overall.
Corporations suck. The entire reason they exist is because of the high transactional costs surrounding labor (there’s a Nobel winning economics essay on this from the turn of the 20th century called “the nature of the firm”).
They will reduce value and increase price as much as possible because they only exist to be a middleman between the consumer and the producer.
But right now there’s no alternative. It’s crazy expensive to make AA and up games so you need to target mass market appeal to get the money for it and usually need to crawl up finance bros’ asses who don’t even play games and look down on those who do.
That’s all about to change dramatically.
Co-op studio structures where employees are owners, smaller teams with large aspirations, franchises with small but dedicated fan bases - these largely died out in the 90s besides remnant very indie groups as transactional costs to produce a game went through the roof and those costs are about to turn around.
Yes, gen AI means less people are needed to make a game. But it doesn’t mean less people will be making games. It means there will be more games, and games coming from people with vision rather than coming from people with a quarterly statement they are trying to maximize.
Hello Games was a team of around a dozen people, and while it was a bumpy road, using procgen allowed them to build an entire universe. Well procgen and a whole host of other tools are about to suck a lot less and be much more accessible to even small studios to make ambitious games.
My hope is that we see things happen rapidly enough that many of the thousands of devs who have lost their jobs at mega-corps will be able to reorganize to take on the Goliaths and win rather than be forced to move on to other industries.
A shakeup is about to happen that’s going to destroy the season pass, micro transaction, soulless meat grinder that’s most large studio/publishers today - it’s just maybe ~3 years out from the inflection point of no return.
But one thing is for certain - most of the largest games companies are woefully unprepared for what’s coming and are about to be stepped all over like Blockbuster or Circuit City.
right now there’s no alternative. It’s crazy expensive to make AA and up games
You’re kidding? UE5 with Nanite is a whole-ass studio and you can use it for free and pay a percentage once you’re making money. It’s never been cheaper and the games have never been more plentiful. AAA has this problem exactly because games like Palworld are hits eating huge amounts of gamers’ time.
I need to get back to playing W3. It seems like a great game by all accounts. But, I will not be purchasing another game from CDPR until at least 6 months post-release given the state of CP2077. Not only was it released in an unacceptable state, it wasn’t the game that was promised. There have been so many good games released between last year and this year, I can wait until ~2030 if they need to take their time polishing it and making it a complete experience.
Not only that, but their PR person gaslighting people with the article claiming that the game wasn't bad, it was just "cool to hate" has left a really bad taste in my mouth. The game could be absolutely amazing now and the expansion pack could be the game that we were always promised, but the experience and the follow-up has been so bad that I'm similarly waiting until post launch (heck, perhaps even until GOTY with included DLC) for any future CDPR games.
I personally couldn’t make it past the “no object permanence” issue, where NPC’s would just spawn into and out of existence depending on where the camera was pointing. It was like a magician brought a clear cloth to the table to perform a trick, and we could see how the trick was performed the entire time. It doesn’t make his performance less impressive, but it sure would make it less immersive.
Not rendering != despawn entities and respawn entirely new entities every time your camera changes direction. They also advertised it as NPC’s each having their own unique routines, etc. Talk about overpromising and underdelivering. This broke immersion too much for me to play the game. The second I hit the city and saw how NPC’s were handled, I was done. It’s unfortunate, because I thought the map design, sound, graphics, and gunplay all seemed really good.
Unpopular opinion: I liked the characters and lore a lot, but I found that the sloppy controls and sluggish movement made the world frustrating to interact with, and most of the encounters were so repetitive that I was bored before long. I ended up switching to easy mode so I could finish the story without having to spend much time on the tedious gameplay.
IMHO, if you were to rush through W3 in story mode and skip the side quests, just to get the background before playing W4, I don’t think you’d be missing much.
I have only played a few hours, but I recall what I thought was a side quest involving pigs, which was a great quest. Are you suggesting that memorable side quests are infrequent and can/should be skipped?
I actually found the side quests’ writing pretty good, and indeed, sometimes even memorable. Unfortunately, most of those quests share a handful of nearly identical tasks, so the good writing started to feel like little more than window dressing before long.
The map encounters were worse, though: Lots of question marks telling me exactly where to go meant there was nearly no real exploration to be had in this open world, and arriving at them led to the same copypasta events over and over again. If you happen to enjoy those events enough that you can’t get enough of them, then that’s great, but I was bored after the first dozen or so. (Skyrim was far better in this department.)
I remember liking a lot of the main quests, and the characters, and the story, and the world building. It’s just that the bulk of the gameplay felt like filler content, with forgettable combat and awkward controls. (I swear, Geralt, if you plod forward one more time when I pull back on the stick, or let one more candle get in the way when I try to interact with something useful, I’m gonna smack you.)
I hope Witcher 4 maintains (or even improves upon) the writing quality of its predecessor, and adds responsive controls and interesting gameplay beyond the main plot points.
You realize cyberpunk wasn’t the only game they’ve made that needed fixed after release right? Both W1 and 2 had enhanced edition patches to fix the broken shit in both games. W1 was a 7/10 game on release by multiple outlets. W3 was the first game they actually took their time with and delayed multiple times to avoid the enhanced edition patches. Anyone who thought cyberpunk was going to be flawless on release was breathing in that hopium.
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