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.
Same with Far Cry which is a shame because it used to be a really fun dumbshooter series. I got FC6 on sale last month and had to slog through it, I swore off the franchise after finishing the game and haven’t touched it since, even though there’s plenty of post-game content left for me.
Far Cry 6 made some decisions that didn’t make sense to me. I was always running out of ammo, which is something you shouldn’t have to worry about in a Far Cry game. Having essentially just 4 magazines doesn’t go far in a protracted firefight, and the Supremo is inconsistent to use. In Far Cry 5, the amount of ammo you could carry was roughly double the amount.
You could also change your weapons at any time through the menu (so you’re essentially carrying like 50 weapons) but you can’t change your ammo type unless you’re at a workbench (although I think they fixed this later on), which is the opposite of the previous games.
The game map is nice and large but it suffers from generic Point of Interest syndrome that is common in Ubisoft games.
At least the plot was zany at times, particularly the side missions.
Sad to see our resident AAAA game developer not doing well, but it was largely of their own making here.
I haven’t played FC5 nor 6, but the running out of ammo really feels like FC2. Having to scavenge for weapons in the middle of fights or using mounted guns and grenades to kill enemies. Wich I think really improves the game, but it could not be as good in these other releases.
I’m not a fan of the current trend of remakes, but a re-release of Far Cry 2 might be the only thing Ubisoft could make that I’d still be interested in.
The degrading weapons, fire physics, and stealth* were leagues better than anything in the later games. If they fixed the instant enemy respawning, added more fast travel stations, and toned down the OP DLC guns that made scavenging weapons pointless it’d be a nearly perfect game.
YMMV. It had “fire from the brush and reposition while the enemy searches for you” stealth rather than the “crouch behind someone and you’re completely invisible” stealth of later games. I liked it but a lot of people hated FC2’s stealth gameplay.
Im honnestly impressed by how much of a slog FC6 was. God at launch the people delivering your cars were so painfully slow everyone just resorted to shooting the driver once they showed up. I don’t even know if they’ve fixed that.
If you want a stupid fun “kill infinite number of baddies working for an insane BBEG” style game, Just Cause is a blast. 2 and 3 were both fantastic (3 smartly gave you infinite explosives) and the amount of silly chaos you can cause (and are rewarded for causing too!) is brilliant.
For an example, in JC2 there’s a mission where you have to destroy a rocket which is launching using a fighter jet and blow up the rocket before it reaches orbit. The ongoing challenge was simply that I’d shoot it until I got too close, not start maneuvering for a second pass until it was too late and instead crash into the rocket dying in a fiery explosion, followed by the rebel leader telling me over the radio that I’d failed and to try again. Then one of the time, I shot the rocket until I got too close, started maneuvering too late, exploded as the plane crashed into the rocket and the rebel leader started saying something over the radio, except it was a congratulatory statement, and I realized I’d instinctively ejected from the plane at impact, and was now falling down to the ground with only my parachute and lots of enemy aircraft trying to kill me. So I grappled to a helicopter, persuaded the crew to let me in (aka beat them up and threw them out) then got shot to hell by another helicopter, which I conveniently would grapple to, persuade its crew to let me in, and keep repeating the process until I finally was close enough to the ground to grapple down to the ground and steal a fast car to evade the enemy army.
JC3 one-ups this by instead of having you blow up a rocket (an ICBM in this case) but instead catch up to and ride the ICBM so you can redirect it to save a major city.
It was even better than that in my opinion once. FC1 and 2 were fairly intelligent, capable, and innovative shooters. FC3 was dumb fun, but importantly sold ridiculously well so they decided that’s all it would ever be and that gets stale fast.
Honestly, it wasn’t even Assassin’s Creed anymore, it was more like Warrior’s Creed starting from Odyssey to Valhalla, and then they backtracked to more assassin like gameplay with Mirage. I stopped buying their games when I realized how bad Far Cry 5 and Odyssey were.
I like the concept of Origins and Odyssey (I only played some of Odyssey and haven’t cared about AC in ages). You’re right that it shouldn’t have been an AC game though. They could have set it in the same universe and just called it something else, but we can’t have new IPs. Honestly, if they wanted to do the same thing but make more sense for the gameplay, I think you playing a Templar would have been an interesting way to do it. I don’t remember much of the lore, but that seems like it’d work.
I really enjoyed Driver: San Francisco. Then Ubisoft introduced UPlay and I couldn’t play it anymore. That was the last time I installed anything from Ubisoft.
I tried to reinstall it recently and it complained that you can’t install 32bit software from Steam anymore. I guess I’ll never play another Ubisoft game.
I entirely stopped playing Ubisoft games because they require me to sign in to play.
I straight up can’t play half of their games on PlayStation because of this. I had a different PSN account 15 years ago that my Ubisoft account is associated with and apparently your Ubisoft account can only be tied to one PSN account EVER. I’m not creating a new email just to sign up for Ubisoft play. So I don’t buy their games 🤷
The rest can burn, but man, Anno 1800 really is/was the best in its series, mandatory logins or not. It’s the only game I still hold on to my ubi account for, and I dread the day they’ll go under, because they’ll take the Mainz team and the Anno games down with them.
This is rather pedantic and obfuscates the reality and consumer rights. Don’t shill for big corp with that narrative, you could argue you don’t “own” a book either if we’re just doing silly talk in here.
Devil’s advocate: you obviously own the physical media that constitutes the book, but do you really “own” the contents of the book if you’re not allowed by law to make a million copies of it and sell them?
First off, I only called them a moron on a condition, and I stand by my assessment.
Second, playing devil’s advocate is meant to enhance discussion. What they’re doing is muddying the discourse and playing into the hands of copyright-holders. It’s very close to the “just asking question” bullshit that’s so prevalent recently.
You don’t, though. Or rather, you don’t own its contents. It’s not being pedantic, it’s simply correct.
This isn’t a perspective shilling for big corp. If anything, understanding that society has already sleepwalked into a post-ownership era long ago, and that technology has only just now appeared to let the logical conclusion of that come home to roost, should only increase one’s unease of mass unchecked corporate ownership.
You can’t buy a book, copy it, and profit from those copies because you don’t own the IP. But you own the book for your personal use (and you can lend or sell it) in perpetuity, without any dependence on whoever sold it to you. That last part is no longer possible in the digital world with games that are architected specifically so that core functionality is server-side only.
Like with pirating, it was always an issue of expense. They could legally take away your disk at any time and force you to uninstall the software from your computer. It just would never be worth it to go after any specific individuals for any minor infraction of the license. Digital licensing just made them capable of doing that with the press of a button.
It seems I’m miscommunicating. I’m being interpreted as saying, “We’re already here, and this is fine actually.” My point is “We’ve been on the setup for ages, you shouldn’t be surprised this is where we are going without intervention, and we need to intervene right now”.
The world hasn’t slowly built up to being this bad. They’ve been laying the traps for a long time. We’re in the late game, not the early game. There is a lot to undo.
It was not like this back in the '90s. Games you purchased were on disk/disks. You installed the game and played the fully completed game that did not require an online connection. You owned that game.
After the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 things changed. So it has not always been like this.
Before the internet, the concept of game ownership was much easier. Whatever the seller chose to call it, as long as I had complete control over when and where I could play the game, I owned it. I would consider any game where the ability to play it cannot be willfully taken from me by digital means to be owned by me. Nowadays, that mostly applies to cracked games or systems only. No game that requires an online connection to play would apply.
Oh that’s easy. For me at least. In my analysis, the law is wrong.
Where are the assets stored. On local storage? Then I own a copy of the assets.
Where is the game logic executed? Locally? Then I own a copy of that game logic. A server? Then I own non of that logic. A hybrid of the two? Then I own a copy of what my hardware processes.
Where is the game save data stored? Locally? Again, that a copy I own. On a server? I’m licensing it.
Here’s a good analogy: Monster Hunter: Processing, assets, and saves are all on individual machines. I can be cut off from the internet, and still play. I own a copy.
Diablo IV: the assets are local, processing my inputs is local, but my saves and the game logic are all processed on a server. I own a copy of the assets and input logic. Blizzard owns the rest as they process the rest.
If they want to do the whole “resources=expense” then I get to consider MY resources as expense too.
I don’t think most people’s sense of “ownership” of a copy of a game has anything to do with whether or not they’ve legally bought a license.
For most of my collection, I own a physical thing, that represents the ability to play that game, using hardware I bought, whether I bought those things today, last year, or even a decade ago. Some of my games are digital, but I still have possession of a copy I bought, and can play it whenever I want. I paid money for the right to play a game when I want, and that’s a notion of ownership.
If someone can take it away from me, that isn’t aligned with my notion of ownership, and also isn’t worth spending money on imo. I own some GameCube games, and yes, technically that means I have a license, but they still work physically and legally. There’s nothing to enforce against me.
The thing that changed is the ability to revoke that license. And that amounts to a different concept than ownership. One not worth paying for.
That’s not what they meant. The person who said it was “director of subscriptions.” They meant gamers need to get used to all games being SaaS because they are of the opinion that that’s what’s going to happen. SaaS is capable of generating magnitudes more money than any other paradigm, so this is of course the wet dream of the bean counters.
The problem with the statement, of course, is threefold:
People don’t like being told things that sound a lot like "just hand over your money and like it, dumbasses"
SaaS is also capable of failing spectacularly
(most important) In no conceivable world would it be possible to have every single game be a subscription service
Shit, the world can’t even support half a dozen streaming video subscription services, but they think everybody’s going to gladly pay monthly fees for every game they play?
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