I installed the first one but never got around to paying it cause I beat the game so many times but it’s been forever since I played jak 2 or 3 so I’m much more interested in this.
There’s also a recent trend of “forever games”, where it’s clear that the goal is to keep you playing it perpetually. It has both upsides and downsides. These games tend to change intensely over the years. Minecraft is such an example.
I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.
I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk and NMS did exceptionally decent first day numbers…and then they didn’t do exceptionally decent numbers due to the well-deserved backlash. They would have sold even more copies over the last 5 years if they didn’t scare half of the gaming industry away initially. You have to work really damn hard to save your game from death. Case in point: Bethesda isn’t working to save Redfall and it shows.
Whenever I hear this quote I also think of the developers/publishers. They need to have a good reputation so people buy their games.
I think that’s why EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Activision, etc sales have gone down. I will not say that gamers react fairly when it comes to unfinished game releases, but it takes one bad game to ruin a developer. Especially when you consider how small the margins are or if they are publicly traded. Even developers with good games have recently been going out of business because it’s not sustainable.
I also think of their legacies. Especially in a post-steam world, a game with a good legacy will continue to sell for much longer. I don’t think a game like Watch Dogs ever got rid of the stink surrounding it, even though it isn’t a bad game to go back to nowadays.
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren’t on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it’s released.
Look, No Man’s Sky set the precedent for what you’re supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.
Obviously sucking at launch is bad. But it’s inevitable that some games will suffer that fate and as No Man’s Sky showed, that’s no excuse for the game continuing to suck after launch.
Yeah, if a product is sold, I expect it to work for the most part. Now, mistakes happen, and not much to do about very obscure things and it's great if thing can be added afterwards.
But what I want, and this is apparently wild, is a finished 1.0 product that works as expected.
I pre ordered no man’s sky, because the people who made fucking Joe Danger said “I’m going to procedurally generate a universe”
I played it a bit at launch, but the antihype, especially spoilers about the ending made me stop. It’s a bit dense to try to get back into at the moment, but I regret nothing. I paid a modicum so that the guys that made Joe Danger could make a universe, and because me and people like me didn’t demand a refund, they got to do it.
Agree. Also the same with CP77 - I don’t care how much they update and polish that game, I’m not touching it again. It was barely playable on XBOX1X on release. I luckily was able to sell my launch day copy with a small loss, but I’m not trusting them with my money again, after I (and many others) have been misled, and given an unplayable game on consoles.
I am not an investor to lend money to the company for development, I am a consumer, so I want a working game for my money on Day 1, otherwise I’m shopping elsewhere - as plenty of studios manage to great and polished games (e.g. most PS exclusives).
I always wait a few years before buying a game. It prevents situations like this and saves aot of money to boot. Not just the game price but also because I don't need the highest spec pc
I have no proof but in my eyes it all smells like Sony and other gaming news are to blame. They hyped up the game to unachievable levels and then held Hellogames to the previously set deadline. I am very happy they sat down and finished the game, although there is new content patch ever few months still. Gave them those 60$ happily even though it’s not my kind of game.
CP2077 had a bunch of issues on release as well. Much better now. I feel like they(developers) need to bring in different testers near release. If you have the same testers whom have been testing builds for years it can probably be hard to see the issues with the same clarity.
Also stop having release dates. Just use vague terms like 2nd half 2024. When you get the release build, anounce a date, like a month later, give your devs a couple weeks off as there will be missed bugs after release. Hard release dates aren’t helping these situations.
It’s not about unknown issues on the dev side, it’s about greed. CDPR wanted to release for Xmas when the large playerbase of the prev gen consoles was still relevant, so they happily pushed marketing and lied to take people’s money, hoping they can pay exec bonuses and fund future development from that.
Sony had to pull the game from the online store, as it was barely playable. One good question of course why Sony would let it even be there without testing, but of course major companies are trusted to QA themselves, and not release a broken game - luckily this seems to work most of the time.
Because people will pre-order games to the point that it’s made a healthy profit even before it’s even released. Consumers vote with their wallet and for some reason gamers just constantly choose to show publishers that shoddy, half-assed products are good enough for them.
Exactly, when you buy a shit product you should learn not to do the same thing. People are still out here buying crap and complaining on the internet where the money having developers couldn’t give less of a fuck.
Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
There were patch and updates back in the day. The problem was that not everybody had a good internet connection or a connection at all, during the 90’s.
Games like Daikatana and SiN were flops due to bugs that required patches to fix.
It’s because that’s how capitalism works. If you keep buying stuff from the same source without due diligence, you can’t be surprised when you get stuck with another sucky game.
The only incentive to spend resources on fixing a game is to preserve reputation for future games.
I’m not being snarky there. If there are no deadlines and unlimited feature creep, you get Star Citizen. Or rather, you never get Star Citizen except as a janky hyper-monetized pre-alpha.
Nah star citizen was a scam first, game second. If it ever produces a game it will have been purely incidental to continuing to run the scam and milk those whales
I kind of believe Chris Roberts himself is just an overambitious perfectionist. He pulled the same kind of bullshit with Freelancer, which only released because Microsoft put its foot down.
I can also believe that a lot of the top people around him are grifters feeding his ambition and perfectionism to keep the gravy train running.
Either way, they got my Kickstarter money so the only entertainment I’ll ever get from that game is opining about it like I know anything.
Chet Falizek, a dev who led L4D and a couple other games at valve talks about this a lot on TikTok, now that he’s running an indie studio. He’s a cool guy, would fit in on .ml or something for sure.
Valve was a completely new company then. They weren’t going indie, but Sierra didn’t pay them for the remake of Half-Life. In the documentary they talk about financing it by creating Half-Life: Day One.
Usually publishers have multiple products in development simultaneously with varying degrees of investment, the more money invested into a studio to develop a game the more urgent they want it finished.
The dude has been a bastion of how to run a company that delights its end-users and doing their best to run a company ethically. A staunch group of people that believe in right-to-repair as well as believing in modding and community growth of games.
Yes there’s issues on the publisher/developmer side of things, however Valve constantly works with studios to help mitigate these pain points and on-board to their platform.
wizards are turning into Gaben as he echoes across eternity. It seems like he’s turning into a wizard, but that’s because we can only see behind us in time.
I actually have that in my library because I bought the Index but haven’t played it yet because I wanted to play the first 2 games first. I didn’t play the first game for very long tho because I got stuck at some point early into the game and haven’t felt like continuing yet. You can also really feel the age of that game, controls and that kinda stuff. Not sure if I should just punch through that game or just say fuck it and play Alyx.
Well you’re in luck because there are VR mods available free for the older Half Life games. Just get the Orange Box or something with all the half life backlog and VR mod them for free.
If by “first game” you mean HL1, you could try playing “Black Mesa” which is a fan remake of the game, in the same engine that powers HL2. It’s not a 1:1 recreation, but it’s close enough (and I feel it improves on some things).
HL2 is also 3 seperate games (HL2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2), so make sure you have all of those in your library.
At the very least, I’d suggest playing HL2/EP1/EP2 before Alyx, since those would provide the expected background for Alyx, despite it technically being a prequel-ish thing.
Half life 1 just got a new big update that makes it much better to play this day and age and fixed a bunch of bugs. Either way you could skip 1. As a kid I never played 1 and went straight into 2, then 2 episodes 1 and 2 with the orange box. I still haven’t finished 1 but with this new update I think I’ll go back to it some point soon now.
Am not sure there’s a way for them to release HL3 and don’t disappoint huge number of people. Not because they suck at making games but because expectations have grown so so so much they are downright unachievable now.
Fair point, even with upgrades a la Cyberpunk 2077, the lost sales out of the gate are unlikely to be made up a year and a half later when they release the game they should have released in the first place
tbf that’s a lot easier to say when you’re the president of one of the richest companies in the industry. I don’t disagree, but not everybody has the resources to just keep developing forever, and that’s easy to forget too.
In the documentary this quote is from he said that about thr development of HL1. To be fair the devs themselves said they voluntairily crunched quite a bit and had some time constraints at the end of the game.
But he’s also president of one of the richest companies in the industry because he always said this.
And while your point is valid for smaller studios, it feels like it’s usually used by the big ones that do have the resources, but would rather give more money to investors.
Yeah, no one has a problem with small indie groups doing early access, aka terraria, rimworld, factorio, minecraft. It’s about keeping expectations in check and having a good fun base game.
Rogue Legacy 2 had a great early access in part because it was regular releases with a lot of communication and they set great expectations for it. I knew what I got myself into and had a blast trying each new area as it came out.
The context for this was them deciding to take the time to finish the game properly even if they were no longer going to get paid to do it (the publisher would stop funding).
Some basic things to note, that may or may not be obvious.
Producers and shareholders are the ones still thinking gaming audience can be milked at the same rate as the past few decades.
The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.
Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
Edit: “most” people are not but a significant number of people are. That was overestimated. Our generation’s psychological patterns differ from the ones before that did not play these modern and/or 3D games.
And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
You have no clue how ADHD or other neurological disorders get accelerated due to video games of various kinds. Many other conditions like epilepsy, vertigo also get accelerated or triggered.
A significant amount of the audience is. “Most” probably is an overestimation and a bit sensational. I am neurodivergent, am ex-pro gamer and I have spent enough time gaming as a teen to know the thought processes gamers go through. Remember, we are the first generation to have played these modern games that were not just 8-bit.
The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.
I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.
Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.
That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.
Didn’t colonial marine turn out to actually have really good AI that totally changed the game feel that had been broken by a single misplaced semi-colon or something?
polygon.com/…/aliens-colonial-marines-fixing-code… yep, a code typo broke the alien AI. Unfortunately for that game though no amount of delays could’ve helped it, there were many more problems besides the AI. The AI was just the biggest problem.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne