That’s unfortunate. I want to try this game, but I feel like I’m either going to love it, or hate it, and don’t want to waste my money if it’s the latter.
If you or a friend has a PS5 with a PS Plus Premium subscription, you can trial the game for two hours. Your progress will transfer over if you decide to buy, but that’s as close as you’re going to get to a demo I think.
So…Bungies leadership is worried that Sony will completely take over, so they’re making it into a dumpster fire?
That’ll only mean that Sony will take over and fire the Bungie executives making these decisions, giving them generous severance packages on top of all the bonuses they’ll give themselves for cutting costs…wait, I think I figured it out.
If Bungie falls short of certain financial thresholds by too great an amount, Sony is allowed to dissolve the existing board and take full control of the company.
Also the article mentions the board being split 50/50 between Sony and Bungee, with 1 tie breaker. So I don’t think they’re trying to hand it over to Sony when they could’ve just done that at any stage without a convoluted scheme.
I hope it gets all the love and care The Witcher series and its fans deserve. They are going to have to make up a lot of ground with consumers to get back to W3 standards though.
I hope the praise heaped on Cyberpunk 2077 now doesn’t let them forget the absolute shitshow of a launch so that they don’t try to rush out the next game half-baked as well.
I think the biggest problem for Cyberpunk was that they also released it on last gen consoles which cost them many resources that could’ve otherwise been used to polish the game for the other platforms.
They also flat out lied about what kind of game it is right until the release. They promised NPCs with their own lives and incredibly intricate dialogue choices that have ripple effects on the whole game. Nothing like that is in the game, even now.
I hate that they make it sound, as if it’s an impossible issue to solve. It’s underperforming because new people can’t figure out what to do in the game, and veterans cannot find enough things to do. You can only play crucible for so long.
They clearly have the artists and the engineers to do this, but they put all of that effort into new cash shop skins, rather than game content
a lot of the end game content isn’t playable unless you have a guild that constantly grinds for it. And by guilds: these are guilds that are like 5 yrs old and you’re expecting these players to still want to hang around be content with grinding to bring in the newbies to the fold. Good luck with trying to find someone who is willing to teach as their interest wanes. Bungie tried enticing older guilds to teach new players with player banners to do guided runs. But that was a fail. No one has that kind of time on their hands.
Those dungeons are some of the most complicated ridiculous things I’ve ever had the displeasure of researching. Like just watching the YouTube tutorials on kings fall and how they had to speed it up and get nausea while they try to tell you all the keyhole attempts just to open the dungeon was enough for me to nope the fuck off from ever doing raids or dungeons.
And just doing companion apps to try to learn the dungeons was a fail.
games are supposed to be what you do for fun. It’s nothing but stress if one player, just one: fucks up, your whole team is wiped and you just lost the last hour or even two of play. Down the drain. You are just left with despair and hatred for your entire fireteam.
That is how it’s designed without apology.
They actually have players SAVING dungeon points on the companion app. That should tell you all you need to know about how unplayable that EGC actually is.
I made an account in January 2005, probably for HL2.
I initially resisted making an account and I hated Steam back then.
They’ve since fixed a lot of things and I now have 250+ games on it.
I have to admit, Valve is one of the few big game companies that haven’t gone to absolute shit.
Though I dread the day GabeN steps down or sells out…
Another thing that I didn’t agree with back in the day was WoW, paying a subscription to play was a hard no. Still haven’t played it, which kinda sucks because I was a big fan of the old Warcraft games and of RPGs in general.
Voting with my wallet certainly didn’t change much for them, although it probably was better for me.
The first Guildwars was great.
The second one was nice too and I played it a bunch, but there’s something about the first I can’t quite put my finger on, might just be nostalgia.
My GW2 time has been mostly spent helping people with jumping puzzles, which are kinda cut short these days by mesmers making portals for them, which I also do sometimes.
I was considering making the jump from film and television to the video game industry until a year or two ago. I am really passionate about video games, and I really think there’s a lane for me. Unfortunately, after reading so many horrible stories about crunch culture and learning just how demanding the industry can be (even as somebody who worked on some pretty grueling Hollywood sets) I decided not to go that route. It still makes me upset to think about. I just feel like the industry is so terrible it’d be irresponsible and unfair to my family to go down that route. Reading Significant Zero really put the last nail in the coffin for me on that dream, even though it wasn’t the intention of the book. 
I know it’s not much, but I hope that if you don’t already, you find some time for yourself to just make games for the fun of it.
Not if you’re already dealing with overwork stress, but if you have free time that you’d like to spend on something. No one has to play them or you could do game jams (even though that’s inherently crunch, it’s the choice of the dev rather than their boss and more of a self-imposed limitation) or do otherwise random stuff and just let people muck about with whatever you’ve created. No pressure, no deadlines, no expectations.
And since you know already know how production in general works, you’re well aware of the iterative process and won’t fall into the trap of “why is this taking so long and why can’t my graphics be as good as GTA V” or whatever, which a lot of new developers (and programmers and pretty much everyone) encounter.
Hardly surprising that the sales have been soft since launch considering the shocking user reviews. The game is pretty good, but when it barely runs on most users machines people are going to either keep waiting for it to improve or write it off forever. All the die-hard fans who are even interested in the endgame content already have the game.
Even outside of the performance problems, it’s become clear the pattern is to release the base game which is ok, then eventually release an expansion that makes it feel like a complete experience. A lot of people that started with world or rise are just going to hold off for the expansion
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