wtf I never heard of this game before. How come a game that cost ~$140 million had virtually no marketing except for Will Smith posting it on his youtube channel?
The post-apocalyptic zombie shooter allegedly had more than 300 developers on it and a budget of nearly 1 billion yuan (around $140 million)
The word “allegedly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There is no way on this Earth that a mess like that cost $140 million to develop, unless somebody pocketed $130m of that and then just outsourced the rest to a tinpot Z tier studio.
He wishes he got that from it, and looks like he was barely involved other than a quick poorly made advert and use of his face. It’s not even his voice in game.
The whole thing looks like it was thrown together in Unity by a dozen people from mostly stock assets. If that figure is anywhere near accurate then Tencent got scammed.
Unlike OP I have played the game and have to say I diaagree completely with the article. You see the deeper implications of the slavery wherever you go. Sure the violence is the biggest factor but so many side quests show the emotional toll the slavery has on the people. Even just walking in those areas is gut wrenching. I dont know how a final fantasy could portray it better. It is hard to handle already.
You post a lot. I see your name come up non-stop. That is great! It is really appreciated. I'm certainly not doing that work.
You also post quite a bit of inflammatory clickbait without having any personal knowledge to back it up. That's a bit confounding. At the bare minimum, you need to be prepared to accept criticism for that.
I can personally say this is the second time you've posted a FF16 ragebait article and gotten offended when prodded about the fact that you yourself haven't even played it. Why are you spreading information that you don't even have the ability to evaluate?
I post things I think people can talk about, even if I can’t actively take part in it. That’s it.
And if you don’t like what I post, you are more than welcome to block me - I actively encourage people blocking folks they don’t like. Please, feel free.
I've already said that I appreciate your efforts. I'm not going to block you, your work is valuable. I'm just explaining that you ARE going to be criticized for what you choose to post, and you shouldn't act surprised. If you really don't care about whether or not the stories you are propagating have merit, then just ignore anyone who pushes you on it. Consider attacks on "OP" to be the original author of the article, not you.
Or, be more selective about what you post, if the approval matters to you. Consider it constructive feedback.
Please block me. I’d block you (actually, I will anyway), but blocking on kbin is busted and means you would still see and be able to comment on my posts. Hopefully they’ll fix that.
I don’t think their implementation is the way to go. It reeks of bad UI, like Clippy in Microsoft Word.
Mario games are so accessible without the heavy handed videos/stops, because their designers think about how to best teach the player through play.
It’s like teaching by giving people a hour long lecture vs hands-on experience - there’s usecases for both, but in a interactive medium like gaming, one is superior than the other.
Ideally, it would be an optional thing, but oh well.
Yeah tons of games ask you at the start of the game, like “have you played this kind of game before?” Def seems clumsy for a game that otherwise seems pretty well thought out.
I have seen people (in person and on the Internet) click tutorials away, proceed to utterly fail at the most basic tasks only to then blame the game and the developers, including in reviews. I don’t blame developers for trying to prevent this from happening.
Idk if that’s a useful example case. Streamers are under pressure from their audience to be entertaining, so they will frequently skip tutorials against their better judgment bc tutorials aren’t fun to watch. I can’t speak to your irl examples, but it’s possible that there was a similar dynamic happening there. At least, I can say that I have personally felt a similar pressure when playing games while other people are watching me.
Edit: user reviews are good example, though. I could see a dev over-tutorializing bc they are anxious about negative user reviews.
To be fair, it’s a pretty common play. Company makes unpopular decision, walks it back, tries again a little later once the novelty has worn off and the MSM doesn’t care to pick it up again.
I think this particular move is pretty ballsy with how egregious it is (especially considering that starfield didn’t do anything particularly outstanding to overshadow it), but I don’t doubt they’ll try it again. If people keep buying their games, where’s the risk? At worst they’ll still get a few dollars from those who, for whatever reason, buy it, and then it’s forgotten by the next time a game comes out.
They definitely did learn. They learned that they could charge for mods and people, sadly, will pay. They’ve learned that they can make more money by paywalling what should be essential patches and bugfixes. They learned that the average gamer is willing to be fleeced. They learned that they can run an IP into the ground and still extract maximum cash from it.
They’ve learned. They just didn’t learn the lesson that we here on Lemmy wanted them to learn. That’s a sad fact of being part of a minority community.
To be fair Suicide Squad is something he did and passed up Independence Day 2 for believing if he was in one of these “Super Hero Movies that are doing so well” it would revive his career
And he likely would have been right… If he went with Marvel instead of the DCEU
I say big budget games are too large in scope. Too much going on, too ambitious, too much emphasis on certain aspects that I feel developers value more than consumers. Not every game needs to be the biggest baddest game of the year blah blah blah.
For real, I think it’s rather telling that there are people who exclusively play some triple a games for the mini games.
It’s also interesting seeing indie take larger and larger chunks from the triple a market. Remember when harvest moon and simcity were big corporate endeavors, now it’s indie titles like city skylines and stardew Valley.
I would like to see some smaller projects from triple a studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
With the corporate culture that’s developed in the industry I don’t think anyone should want that. Indie has the small project space covered & they make far better games than EA or Activision ever could in those genres. Corporate sellouts cannot beat passion, but they can make games so large in scope that small studios just cannot compete with that.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.
I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.
I’d say its about on par with their past games. It’s clearly their game engine, modified to do space stuff.
If you come at it with the mindset that not every game has to get bigger and more expansive and have more and more realism/mechanics that don’t serve the core gameplay, it achieves it’s goal.
Not saying its game of the year material or anything, but if I was doing an employee review, I’d give it a meets expectations grade.
Starfield is by far their cleanest release. It’s honestly the first game I have played from them that hasn’t crashed in 100+ hours.
There are aspects I wish had received a bit more attention, sure. But to date, Skyrim and Fallout 4 both have stability mods that are basically requirements to reduce crashing.
And I’m saying this as somebody with near 2k hours in Skyrim. So I definitely enjoy that game.
I played Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim at release. Compared to Starfield they were far more polished to me. Yes crashes & the odd broken quest happened, but overall they were playable, people without an internet connection could buy the games in a shop & then finish them. Also Oblivion had the best graphics for an open world rpg when it came out, while also running pretty well on the shit tier GPUs of the time. In my mind, Starfield is not pretty on ultra, runs like shit on decent hardware even at relatively low settings and the list of broken things is endless.
I’m honestly not experiencing the same. I’m running on ultra with an RTX 3080 and rarely even see a stutter and the only consistent bug I see is just comical. When I sprint for a bit and enter a door, my companion will be sprinting into a wall for a bit.
I actually do find Starfield to be a pretty game, as well. They have learned better lighting strategies from previous games and the trees look much much better. I wish the facial and running animations were better, but that’s not so bad as to be too skewer the game.
As far as Oblivion having the best graphics of it’s time, sure. But 2006 basically every game that was going for good graphics achieved the best at release. That was a pivotal period for graphics in games.
Honestly, I’d rather have stellar voice acting and okay graphics (not good, just not bad enough to turn it off after it makes me dizzy) than the other way around. Graphics lose their appeal after a short while in-game.
Imagine if people could buy a background music only -subtitle dialog- edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 for €40. How would the sale distribution go? I think this is a rather interesting thought experiment, I would personally opt to buy the cheaper version for sure, even though I do know the voice acting in BG3 is a landmark in gaming.
I would definitely buy that. I usually keep my game volumes on low and click through the dialogue because I already read the subtitle, why wait around to finish having the line delivered verbally? (Interestingly enough I’ve never ever thought “hurry up, speak faster” in an in real life conversation, this impatience only exists in video games.) Because of the value of voice acting, but for me personally voice acting is just not a priority.
I have played it! I thought the water gameplay was pretty good, but the on land was not my favorite.
I really liked the cyclops submarine as a mobile base. It just felt like it made the underwater sections feel claustrophobic and dangerous at every turn once you encountered the larger leviathans. I missed it a lot in below zero
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