I would expect to see this kind of article in 2019 prior to the launch of WoW Classic, not now in October 2023. Classic has had the same mindset that’s pervasive in retail from the very beginning. Everyone rushed straight to 60 and promptly began raidlogging to preserve their precious world buffs. Parsing and speed running in raids was all anyone cared about.
You are right but classic WoW hardcore has really fixed most of those issues because if you rush things you will probably die. Anyway I really agree with this headline because I logged into retail WoW during a thunderstorm because if you DC while you are playing it's basically an automatic game over, anyway I was bored as hell immediately. Retail is all about doing raids and dungeons, which is fun if you like that but I actually enjoy simply leveling in classic hardcore way more, and the best part is I don't have to be logged in for hours at a time leveling unlike in raids.
For me it wasn’t about the leveling or end game content. It was the engagement - you had to interact with other players, negatively or positively, to truly progress. Then they added dungeon finder and for all I know the other four players could be bots for all the engagement you get.
While four hours would be fast for a new player, 1-10 is very doable in one sitting for those familiar with the game. Early levels are fast; the bulk of those 30 days are later levels. The 50’s in particular are a slog.
It’s not linear. Levels 55-60 took me a week in Vanilla. 45-55 was almost 2 weeks, too; since the quests and dungeons at that level range are sparse. 20-40 was about a week. 1-20 was about a week and a half.
You have to keep repeating yourself because you are wrong. I played Vanilla in 2006 (about a year after it came out) and also played Classic when it came out. Vanilla might have taken me a week to get to 12, I can’t remember anymore; but it was my first MMO and first RPG, my first time playing a social game and didn’t know how to group to quest or even respond to people whispering me, and didn’t have any friends giving me advice on how to play or know what internet resources to use to speed things up. I didn’t even know I could speed things up.
With Classic I was probably to level 10 in a night after work. I haven’t leveled a fresh character in Retail since Cataclysm, so I have no idea how fast it is these days.
If you click the article you’ll see this is tied to the 2020 allegations. Which were mostly following on previous issues but nobody cared about abuse back then.
Not misremembering, it’s Ubisoft after all and Yves loves his sexually assaulting friends. And he said he was sorry for liking them, mkay… that makes it not so bad… in his head at least.
In the US, if you're moved to another location for that amount of time involuntarily that's an arrest not a detention. Seems the French code gives more police powers than our constitution.
Yeah there’s “CEO resigns over sexual misconduct allegations of groping” and “Executive denies sexual misconduct, 13 women have come forward”
But this, what tf did these guys do?! Damn!
Edit: Fucking Christ
"…and after apologizing for that initial behavior over a year later, how he then groped and raped her at an industry event. They claim Gbinigie asked them to meet him and some friends in a hotel lobby ahead of a PAX industry party. Gbinigie, however, arrived alone, and asked if they wanted to head to his friends’ room, where the rest of the group was apparently waiting. After brushing aside a “feeling of panic” and following Gbinigie to the room, they saw there was no one else in the room.
“I’m still not ready to relive the intimate details publicly, but that’s when he forced himself on me. It wasn’t the longest experience as, as he said at the time, his friends were expecting us - but it was enough for him to get out of me what he’d clearly wanted from the start, and to put me in my place,” they wrote.
“It’s taken a long time and a lot of therapy to stop listening to words that are burned into my brain - ‘you should be grateful’ - to forgive myself for the fact that at a certain point I stopped fighting him, and to try to be okay as I can be with the fact that my first experience with sex at all was rape. It wasn’t the longest experience, but it was enough to still fuck me up to this day”
Well this article is kinda saying that they are barely keeping their head above water as it is, and CIG is vastly mismanaging money and driving development heavily on how many ships they can sell in that year.
So if anything I'd say that this strategy doesn't seem to be working out for them anymore
The only part I believed they might actually deliver on since it isn't boggled down by network issues, but I guess even that was too much to hope for. I still remember the 2018 lie of "it's weeks away from being shown" only for them to not show anything or the next 5 years. If it weren't that troublesome to get it (and it's a small sum anyway) I'd probably fight for a refund out of principle alone.
If they’re keeping their head above water, even barely, it means they are keeping their head above water. Without delivering a product. For YEARS.
They’re earning money by selling empty promises year after year. Not a lot of money. They’ll never become billionaires from this game. But there are lots of people in there (mainly executives and CEO and whatever) earning a decent salary. On empty promises! It’s as close to a scam that it can be without being illegal.
I guess, but the fact they are now laying people off is for sure a sign that things aren't going well enough. CR might live the rest of his life in a mansion but his legacy is in a crapper and he's not gonna get another chance at this (at least I hope people wouldn't fall for it twice).
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
Dwarf fortress is a finished game and the original version, which is awesome as is, was always free. Not at all comparable to star citizen or eve online
Dwarf Fortress is very much NOT finished. Its roadmap is already more complex than most live game feature sets and Tarn and Zach are generally pretty adamant about it likely never being "finished"
Maybe consider reading more rather than just having a knee jerk reaction of “comparison to thing I don’t like, bad. I MUST REPLY!!!”
That is true of basically every game. It is why we moved away from “Game, wait a year, expansion, wait a year, expansion. new game” on to DLC and now straight up live games. It is just a reality of development as it lessens crunch (you can put features off for later updates) and removes the old ramp up/down model.
The issue is not that star citizen is trying to be a live game. It is that it is horrendously mismanaged and helmed by a “rockstar developer” and his family. Apparently the brother actually DOES know how to ship a product, but he isn’t the one who runs around telling people to prioritize bedsheet deformation. Or to insist on needing 64-bit coordinates rather than using the industry standard approach of only loading a few cells within range of the player (and then lots of complex shenanigans to update the rest at a much lower rate). And so forth.
And I am not even going to complain (too much) about the sp campaign never coming. That is what I bought a decade or whatever ago and I am still pissed that was immediately dropped in favor of making the game Microsoft said “… fucking no. Release Freelancer god damn it” to. But the majority of current players want star citizen so… fine.
But the issue is just that there is no competent leadership. And all anyone has been able to figure out is “If we keep releasing ships, people will keep buying them”.
Because if they had gotten a vertical slice in? This would have eaten ED’s breakfast and NMS would never have had a chance at recovery. It was everything that every elite game has been working toward (and Evochron already did a decade or so ago…) and would actually give people stuff to do with those ships. Add in new solar systems, game systems, etc after the fact.
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