Hoping the design for this one is a bit. . . tighter? As much as I liked the original, runs usually turned into hopping around trying to not get hit while you hope for enough space to actually use your abilities; or if you had busted items you just about instakill everything. I never found much of an in-between and felt that the sequel handled playing from behind situations much better.
Well they’ve already fixed my biggest issue with the original, you no longer need to kill every enemy to go to the next stage. Everything else is icing on the cake.
We’ll see how they handle being able to avoid damage but I doubt it will be too different from the original.
I’m still worried about Hopoo not being at the helm on this one, as I trust Gearbox about as far as I can throw them, and since they’re a whole ass company of people with a building… not very far.
I did love Risk of Rain 1 a shit ton though, so I hope this turns out well!
I mean Lies of P is probably worth a try while its not a 1 to 1 to bloodborne it shares a decent amount of dna with it. Just wished there were more eldritch abominations.
Totally agree, it is VERY influenced by the from games but also it’s own thing and has extended the soulsborn/sekiro formula in an interesting way with a unique story. I am about an hour from finishing it and was looking at buying the add on but it’s just a couple of items so no thanks. But I will totally buy the DLC. It’s a fun game and imho the best of the From derivatives by far.
No, what killed it was them taking on too many high profile licenses at the same time and trying to juggle high workload and high demand with short turn around. Pair that with the fact that they change and work on things between episode releases, too.
Also related, Bill Willingham, who wrote The Wolf Among Us, released his IPs in the public domain as a middle finger to DC, who’s not paying him royalties, nor did they consult him on the making of the game. - exputer.com/…/the-wolf-among-us-creator-public/
They did. Telltale Incorporated folded in 2018. In 2019 LCG Entertainment bought the Telltale name, licensed their content and said, “We are Telltale Games now. We are going to do what Telltale was doing because that’s what we are: Telltale Games. But not that other Telltale that owes that money to people, that’s a different company.”
Oh I just read about Disney doing that to the guy who wrote the original Star Wars novelizations, I think. They assumed all of Lucasfilm’s assets but not their liabilities, including royalty agreements.
It’s insane that this “works” for companies the size of Disney and Lucasfilm.
Well at least they could make a game that expands on the story, since the story is based on the IP, even if they couldn’t use things specifically from the previous game or call it a sequel.
They went bankrupt ages ago, got recently picked up by another company and revived, and now it seems like they’re going under again. Nobody really knows what’s happening behind the scenes but as the tweet says, seems like they’re all under NDA.
After the revival they just re-released the Batman games, announced a sequel to The Wolf Among Us and then nothing for 4 years? It is sad to see Telltale gone, but at the same time I am not surprised.
They never got revived. A third party bought their titles and company title when they went bankrupt.
The new company renamed a division of itself to Telltale and offered the old devs jobs as temporary contract workers.
None of the previous workers took the job. They did end up hiring Adhoc Studios (real former TellTale members) to work on TWAU2 after development stalled.
It should be no surprise that the company is laying off people. They did nothing with the IPs for 4 years besides sit on royalties.
The games industry is getting absolutely hammered by this stuff.
If there’s a game currently in development, that doesn’t have the backing of a large company and has more than 5 people working on it, there’s a good chance its going to get canned because venture capitol backers aren’t going to pick up the next bill.
To be fair the entire tech industry too is getting hammered. Times are hard on smaller companies, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. I’m hearing about layoffs every few days now.
Unity have already established market dominance, if not effective monopoly, as the mobile gaming development platform. They are in a position of power, they have invested large sums of money to get there, and there is really very little game developers with a product 1 or 2 years in development can do about it.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence. Unity has been loss making for years, which either means they are not financially viable (and not a safe bet), or they are engaging in a strategy of establishing an effective monopoly position to later squeeze dependant customers until the pips squeak.
This is likely just the start, whether it’s through runtime charges, Unity control of in-game advertising, or huge hikes in seat license fees. Possibly all three.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame
In the same way that underpaid workers are to blame for not “just” finding and getting a better job or “learning skills”. Fuck off with that pro-corporate victim blaming.
Not pro-corporate in any way, I don’t see how you could possibly read that into what I posted. But if you choose to sup with the devil, best use a long spoon.
In the case of most of the companies affected by the changes, they literally signed up under a different agreement and then Unity changed the terms once they were pretty much locked in and couldn’t change to another engine without serious costs and/or difficulty.
There’s literally no way indie devs are at fault here and yes, blaming them for being victims of corporate fuckery IS taking the side of the corporation fucking them.
Unity have lost huge amounts of money, in fact never made a profit for a single quarter, while establishing more and more market share, and their customers never asked themselves how or why?
They're game devs, not an acquisition and mergers team. "We signed contract to do business with xyz terms" should be plenty reliable enough for conducting business. Not "Lol, whut? You didn't read the fine print? Psyche! We're changing everything."
If I buy a service, I care about the service, not how the company is doing financially. In fact, I don’t even take the time to look at their finances because who the fuck does that? Are you looking into Netflix each month?
Stallman has always had a bunch of good points. It's just that he's rigid and uncompromising enough about them, and a weird enough dude in general, to turn a lot of people off. "Weird dude" shouldn't matter, but basic human psychology says it does - every time.
If your vendor is constantly making huge losses while establishing more and more market share, your guy in charge of the financial decisions should be asking themselves what the investors long term plans are. That’s not rocket science.
they really only have themselves to blame [...] research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence
Really? They really only have themselves to blame for Unity suddenly making a drastic and poorly thought out change to their pricing policies? Researching with what, a crystal ball?
Changing the pricing structure would be a perfectly understandable and predictable outcome. Unity choosing to adopt a wildly unfair and entirely unprecedented pricing model is definitely not something their customers could have expected.
Why not? And how is it even “unfair”? They want to charge for every copy sold, that was made using, and is still using, their software.
People who compare this to Visual Studio vs. the MSVC DLLs, are forgetting all the privative libraries which charge for every copy they get released with.
Unity is pulling one of those; only because they didn’t before, doesn’t make it “unfair”, just a dick move.
You’re actually making some valid points here, in regard to the trend of companies losing money as a strategy to obtain market dominance and then turning to monetization after. It’s exactly how Uber and AirBNB got where they are, and it’s a strategy that people need to get more wise to. You’re right, and you should say it.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
If you cook an absolutely perfect hamburger and then spit in it right before serving, you can’t act surprised when no one wants to even try a bite.
Security company Guarda permanently operates in the red in the US but keeps itself alive by constantly buying up all the small security companies it can in the US. It’s essentially a MASSIVE ponzi scheme in a sense that it would die if it couldn’t continue to add to it’s ranks.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
I really don’t agree. His phrasing was harsh and unsympathetic, but the world owes nothing to anyone and those developers should have done their due diligence. Trying to cast this in highly broad black-and-white morality isn’t productive. Is it moral what Unity is doing? No. Is it Unity’s right to do this? Legally maybe, but in every other sense, no. Are the developers who decided to use Unity a bunch of wishful thinkers who chose to ignore red flags? Yes. Unity may be thieves, but it’s been clear for a while now that their business model was unsustainable. Everyone who chose to do business with them anyway chose to ignore the warning signs. People are responsible for their own actions, and while they aren’t responsible for being cheated, they are still responsible for ignoring massive red flags with “we’re not a legit business” on them in bright white letters. I, too, blame developers for their share of their predicament, for the same reason that I blame would-be mountain men who starve to death and then get eaten by wolves because they tried to tame a national park with a pocketknife and a Walmart tent.
As for the other people who got really upset, I think choosing to allow yourself to be upset by style to the extent of ignoring the substance is exactly that: an active choice, one you have to consciously make. If you explained to someone why continuing to burn coal for electricity is bad and then finished it with something harsh like “only a total dumbshit would disagree with this”, would that person be justified in saying “What an asshole. Clearly fossil fuels can’t be that bad”? Of course not. If a person did that, they would be in the position of taking in the argument, understanding it, and then actively choosing to disregard it because it conflicts with their feelings. That’s the kind of magical thinking conservatives stoop to when they dispute climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, etc. because they’re butthurt about people saying “of course the world isn’t flat you fucking idiot”. I would hope that people who have a greater degree of emotional maturity than them (i.e. any) would be able to look at a person’s argument from a calmer and more objective point of view. It’s not like that’s even hard.
To be clear, you’re not being unreasonable, but the other people responding to this guy are having proper hissy fits and they really need to get a grip.
That’s public information and it’s very basic information. Anyone running a business knows to check to make sure anyone they form a partnership with is a legitimate business, the same way you know not to hire a sore-covered meth addict from Facebook marketplace to redo your floors. The fact that they were using proprietary software was already a red flag anyway,
By the way, yes I’m aware you’re just sealioning, no I’m not going to engage with it.
Since they bought bandcamp payments have been fucked. Ever since every time someone buys an album it takes 2 or 3 days to reach me. Which is terrible on band camp friday, where all funds go to the artist. Because of the delay instead of getting the entire sale, I get the regular amount. Logins have been breaking, the app has been unstable, and a bunch of smaller issues. They fucked it up.
The giant BR is likely Fortnite, the Battle Royale part that is the game most people know wasn't supposed to be the big deal, what is now Save The World was supposed to be the game and BR was just going to be tacked on.
Their reboot of Unreal Tournament failed. And so did their moba named Paragon. Arguably, their Fortnite Save the World also failed. Gears of War Judgement had poor sales for a Gears game though that may have been mostly developed by People Can Fly.
Generally if we ignore Fortnite and Infinite Blade(a mobile game), their last successful game was Gears 3, from 12 years ago. They basically only have Fortnite, Unreal Engine and the Epic store.
They cancelled a bunch of games like Paragon and Unreal tournament to feed the Fortnite machine, abandoned the main Fortnite mode they had already sold and then started funneling money at the epic store.
The epic store at this point has been such a huge loss, exclusivity deals alone are worth millions and not even those managed to get them a user base.
A company with Fortnite’s and Unreal’s income should not be struggling to make a profit.
I'd venture a wild guess that the revenue split business model behind Unreal Engine, and the strategy around spending tons of money to bring people over to the Epic Games Store, are not sustainable. They probably have been generally subsidized by the huge amount of cash that Fortnite has brought in.
Maybe the Fortnite well has dried up? 2023 has been a strong year for news game releases, and it's possible that Fortnite has lost some of players' attention?
Hard to say, but it's looking like Unity are not the only ones struggling to keep their business afloat.
I only have played Fortnite because my nephew was big into it for a long time, now that he and his friends are in high school they have quit playing, I don't know if that's a big trend, but he tells me it is just not cool to play anymore.
They keep giving away free games each week (they have to pay to the publishers of the games to give away games) yet nobody spend money in the store (I think the average was each user spend like $10 or $15 per year)
They also keep buying exclusives, a thing that cost money...
And we cannot forget all the studios and company they have bought, the purchase cost money and their maintenance too
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