It feels tragic. On the one hand, they made some of my most favourite games especially the Splinter Cell series, and it would be sad to see a once great developer to go. But then on the other, the greedy bastards deserve to go under for ruining some of my most favourite games including the Splinter Cell series.
But seriously though, if Ubisoft do go under, I hope that their IP would go into safe hands, like how Baldur’s Gate franchise has been handed over from Bioware to the competent team of Larian (and I do hope Larian does not enshittify unlike the fate of other companies, such as Ubisoft and EA).
The best thing about it is that they’re not making another BG just because they don’t want to. I think it is safe to say say that they won’t enshitify as long as Swen Vincke is at the helm.
They were decent to the Anno series, but honestly that’s probably just because they didn’t see the value in messing with the formula that Anno solidified around the time of the acquisition and it reliably boosts their numbers with strategy gamers who otherwise might not be customers of Ubisoft’s at all
I played and enjoyed both of them, shutting down the first one instead of giving it offline functionality really pissed me off and was the final straw for me with Ubi. It had a fully offline playable story, NPC vehicles to race etc. and the game would’ve been preserved forever.
Instead we got the crew 2, always online AAA signature garbage.
I’ve always thought they do such a good job at building worlds but are absolute shit on story and content. I wish there was a way they’d just build worlds and then hand it off to someone who knows how to make a decent story. Valhalla and Odyssey had amazing worlds that deserved better stories
consider firing from the top down as your managers aren’t doing shit for the company
I disagree. Because of his… “antics,” I know the name Bobby Kotik, and he’s done nothing but good things for the company. Really uplifted them from a dark place.
Selling IP can go both ways. It could be picked up by someone wanting to do better, or it could be picked up by someone just after a quick buck by doing the bare minimum.
And then there’s Rocketwerkz - They originally bid to develop Kerbal Space Program 2 for Take2, but they lost the bid because the winners showed up fancy concept art while rocketwerkz focused on a solid technical foundation. And then Take2 severely botched KSP2 and the franchise is now considered dead. Rocketwerkz is now building something relevamt from scratch, with their own IP, and it looks really promising. I hope this happens to a lot more AAA titles and IP holders.
KSP2 is such a sad situation all around. The guys working on it had the same idea and were going to build a brand new engine for it to fix the tech debt of the original, but management demanded that they use the original engine “to speed up development time.”
My understanding was that KSP2 was originally going to be just a slightly cleaned up re-release of KSP1. A remaster if you will. Buy up some existing mods, bundle them in, clean up the UI a bit and enjoy the fruits of this new definitive edition of the game. But the team was able to convince Take2 to try to replace the game engine as part of that remaster and truly make it worth while (hence the 4 year delay from the original release date)
The original idea that was sold to the public was essentially “Kerbal Space Program, but bigger.” I couldn’t tell you all of the details or the timetable, but there were a lot of new features planned from the start (a number of which were mods of the first game) including fixing issues that were present in the original and adding things far outside the scope of the first game like multiplayer, colonies, and FTL travel to a new solar system. The dev team openly talked about creating a new engine to fix the physics bugs and such, at least.
I don’t know what happened along the way, but it’s pretty clear that the KSP2 that we have has the engine of the first game in it, as to this day it has many of the same bugs.
My guess is that the team originally planned on a new engine, but at some point, management stepped in and demanded that they use the old engine. IIRC, there was some restructuring that happened during the development - both in taking the project away from the original dev studio working on it, and then restructuring the team that was working on it, so it could’ve happened at some point during that.
Ubisoft is owned and run by a family who are super old French aristocrats who trace their family wealth back generations. The Guillemots have zero idea what their customers want or how to make a good game. They want to make money and don’t care what the poor have to say in criticism or frustration. They are too insulated to feel like they have to improve - it’s the children who are wrong.
I was never very into Ubisoft or their titles, so I’m perfectly content with everything burning to the ground, hoping it’ll send a signal to franchises I actually care about:
Stop developing games for focus panels, and try to innovate instead.
I do not care at all about any Marvel stuff and don’t know many chars but my friend who does wanted to play. I gotta say… it’s a BLAST. I like that I can be a furry.
It actually is pretty fun. I can see this quickly going sour, but currently it is a much better game than Overwatch. No idea what the future holds, but hopefully NetEase can pull through. I loved Super Mecha Champions (2021-2025 RIP, you were gone too soon- Alborada my beloved), so hopefully they keep things going and don’t end this one like some of their other ones (DBD Mobile, for example).
It does a good job of onboarding people. The general tutorial is relatively short and sweet, and character specific tutorials are even shorter. It also gives each character a rank (in stars) for how complex that character is to use effectively.
The game itself is pretty chaotic, so it’s easy to convince yourself that your deaths are incidental, and your victories are a result of you playing well. And as long as you’re having fun you’ll be okay with that. But if at any point you start feeling like someone has your foil, just change characters mid-match and try a new tactic. There’s so many characters you can experiment until you find theirs.
I play lots of Black Widow. Bro plays lots of Venom. The first reaction new people who play with us have, is “woah that ass”. Our default response is “whose?”
So…like…did they just scan her ass with lidar and import it into the game? Because that, alone, doesn’t seem like a tremendous asset. Ass libraries must be a dime a dozen. That’s a tradition as old as the copying machine.
Or did they recycle mocap suit data? That seems much more valuable than a blender rendered rump.
Possibly dressed her up similar to the character photo scanned then retopologized, touched up, etc. Could be they just made a basic female model and used it as a foundation.
Possible she did some mocap as well.
Big thing is it’s easier to make mocap look natural on a model if the model and mocap actor are the same person. Though for a game this stylized I’m not sure it would matter.
This game feels like the perfect game to be cross platform (save game) and I definitely can play it in almost, if not all my devices but I haven’t started because I am suffering of choice paralysis lol.
Yeah, that is fair, and my Android phone is likely to be the one I’d get it… But at the same time, my battery is a bit messed up… So I am thinking my Switch would be better 😂
Not just Uplay, but also their activation servers. Their games make calls to their endpoints to authenticate if you own/access the game and DLC. If those activation servers are decommissioned without a replacement, your game won’t activate and you’ll lose access to DLC.
They announced they would do this for legacy games several years ago, and I was going to lose access to all the DLC I paid for with my Splinter Cell Blacklist game that I physically owned on a Wii U disc way back in 2013. Bought all the DLC because I loved the game. After enough gamer backlash, Ubisoft backpedaled and the activation servers remain for now. However, the concern is still there that I’ll lose the stuff I paid for when they decide they can’t serve it anymore or if they go bankrupt. Without them updating the game code or open sourcing it, I lose updates, DLC, etc.
We need digital ownership reform, or else it’s piracy time again. This will especially be critical when Gabe steps down from Steam and new owners are appointed, or if Steam goes public.
That’s awful, sorry. Sadly, until we globally overhaul the laws regarding DRM, or consumer backlash threatens to destroy the industry (like with music piracy), this kind of garbage will continue to happen.
lemmy.world
Aktywne