The AAA market seems to be chasing a business model that isn’t there any more. I don’t know why game developers still chase photo realism, it isn’t what makes money.
There are still good AAA releases, it’s just that 95% of AAA games are not worth the price.
I would argue the old business model still works, it’s just that most AAA games studios don’t follow that model anymore. Back in the day, a full priced game didn’t have DLC or MTX, was an actual complete game, and focused more on the fun than the profit making. Games tried new ideas, they innovated instead of chasing whatever fad is popular at the time. It’s the modern AAA game business model that is the problem and doesn’t work anymore.
If 95% of the games aren’t worth the price, then there is something wrong with that business model.
Yeah, a full priced game might not have had DLC or MTX, but it was more expensive adjusting for inflation and didn’t have nearly the quantity or quality of in game assets as current games do.
And old games definitely chased fads, they were just different fads at the time fed in part by the differences in game economics.
Not to mention until it's actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It's better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.
This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.
In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.
To be fair, while unreal isn’t FOSS, it’s source code is at least openly viewable so devs would find it easier to make easily transferable alternatives
Also if theirs a engine bug you can crack it open and fix it yourself, handy if you’re not a AAA studio who has epic Devs on speed dial. Though I believe you do have to share any code alterations with epic if it’s hosted on a private repo
I can see why you would think that, but there’s alot of stuff unreal just isn’t that good at, things like 2d games are a massive struggle to work with in unreal, so it’ll gain more popularity, but mainly from devs making 3d games with a focus on high graphics
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn’t there some way to quickly see what’s worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It’s entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn’t make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It’s one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can’t tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.
I don’t agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that’s appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don’t think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I’d have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your “active” inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I’d still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and ‘notes’ go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn’t really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I’d do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I’m just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I’d also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it’s just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I’m wishlisting, I’d love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. ‘sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps’
Yes and it flows through to the skill system too. 8 points for carrying more crap across yourself and the ship, and 4 more for increasing companion inv. Even more if you include pockets upgrades on suits.
Are these good skills? Not for the player to choose but to be available in the game. What’s the balance here? What’s the decision, carry more crap at the expense of doing more damage? Is that good choice to give the player? How do you balance encounter difficulty around that? You can’t the player has to choose encounters based on their gimped pack rat skills.
Every part of the game needs a single big mod overhaul to pick a coherent direction.
Accidents happen. Your finger slips and suddenly your game is full of Nazi symbols. Happens all the time. Also, I get the gist of Garriss's response, but mentioning that he had men and women at his house and his mother was always present just makes things sound weirder than a simple denial. Sounds like a horrible situation all around.
Sear the name Aspyr into your mind, and look out for them when they redo old star wars games like this. An underwhelming experience is what I've come to expect from their attempts at Jedi Outcast/Academy and Republic Commando on Switch.
The best you can expect from them is bare minimum passably running games, sort of the antithesis to Night Dive
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.
The industry did this to itself, and while i cannot imagine the pain and stress of working 80hrs+ and hitting dead lines…no one pulled the brakes on the train, covid revealed how absolutely deficit heavy the gaming community was operating under. this happened once before, history isn’t repeating but its dropping and spitting hell fire rap bars
IT'S ALMOST AS IF THERE IS A DEFINED SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS THAT'S SUCKING MONEY FROM THE ECONOMY
Less infighting, more eating of the rich. Pay the devs, not the landlords. The capitalism system is broken and breaking further. The cost of goods is defined by how much workers need to be paid to make it, and then multiplicatively inflated by how much greed that BILLIONAIRE CLASS wants.
Government is for the people, by the people, that's the ONLY reason it exists. People in, and that want to be the billionaire class have declared war on the rest of us, and it's the government's sole purpose to protect the well-being and will of the people.
The government MUST serve the people.
If it can't, the highest priority is it MUST be fixed immediately.
The longer we flail and wait, the more that obviously hostile class of people grow in power and make fixing this a more and more serious issue.
Like any good leader, if you are failing in your duties, you must self-correct, elect an adequate replacement, or you must be removed, by your own will or by force.
Because life-time is too precious to waste waiting for the conflict to come to a head and burst.
That hostile class is doing everything possible to prevent any of this. Calm down, diffuse, obfuscate, confuse, project, gaslight, lie, cheat, steal, destroy, and gain power to RULE above the-will-of-the-people: the government.
They "apologize" about "confusion" and "angst" that us stupid peasants have? That doesn't sound very apologetic to me. That sounds like they're doubling down.
Heck, this worse. We wouldn't lose massive amounts of money when posting on Reddit. This is about the existance and viability of development and companies.
I'm in act three right now, and the most noticeable issue I've run into has been characters mistakenly referring to choices I supposedly made. Really takes you out of it when that is such a focus of the game.
I also have Minthara in my party, and I can confirm that she's broken as hell. You give up quite a lot to recruit her, and it's not worth it at all. Don't do it.
I had a laugh when everyone had !'s and I go talk to them and they are all commenting on the death of Shadowhart, but every single time, you can see Shadowhart just vibing in the background because I prevented Lae’zel from killing her.
This is an act 1 scene that you probably missed because you warped to act 2 without enough long rests done to play them all. It’s… been a while since the game released and it’s written in a thread where they are commenting Minthara recruitment, which is arguably way more spoilery than this.
I replayed act 1 three different times going about 10 hours into each one. I’ve never encountered laz trying to kill shadowheart. I know what the scene is as I’ve seen it in passing on the internet. But I’ve never had it… dafuq?
Possibly tied to how deep into interactions with them you’ve had. If you keep them together in the party and not just at the camp, they argue a lot. Though with the bugs, it could have simply not been triggering. After patch 1, there are so many scenes I never saw my first 2 times through despite doing pretty much the same exact things in the same exact order until the goblin camp.
Yeah, I had one of those happen that ended up spoiling something really big, along with really confusing the ever-loving daylights when it happened, because I had absolutely no idea what Gale was talking about, because he was referencing a quest I hadn’t actually started yet.
I’m going to put my currently playthrough on hold until patch 2. I don’t mind waiting a bit.
At least Sony had some justification. A new and expensive cell architecture. It was ground breaking for its time but cost too much.
Nintendo is giving us something the steam deck and other pc handhelds can do, and trying to charge $80 for games that will almost never go on sale. I can buy old steam titles for less than $10, show me an old Nintendo title that can ever sell for that amount. It’s just not a good enough proposition just to have access to a handful of $80 Nintendo titles.
Yeah, I could stomach the price of the console, but no way am I ever going to pay those outrageous prices that never go down for first party games, and without those there’s no point in getting a Switch 2 over a Steam Deck. I’ll have a lot of Nintendo games to catch up on once decent Switch 2 emulators are a thing.
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