I’d say they’ve really got the game to a good place at this point. In ways it still isn’t perfect, but if it had been like this at release then people would’ve absolutely loved it.
It’s something I think about for quite a lot of open world games, but it always seems like a waste that companies just move on from building up a game.
Really feels like they could spend years just adding to the world they’ve built.
Gamers proved to them that it didn’t matter if the game sucked on launch. Why keep building free updates when you can dump money into a new game? Which will most certainly be broken at launch again. Preorders need to stop being a thing and then we won’t have this type of mess anymore.
You and I don't, but gods, every time a new game trailer drops, the Discord communities I'm in all go HYPE HYPE HYPE I'm preordering. Or you can just see it from the YouTube comments. Too many idiots giving their money before a product has been proven.
I don’t worry about the complaints of people who pre-order anymore. I sit back and eat popcorn watching them rage about the quality of the launch title after paying full retail.
I’ve Kickstarter, when I wanna give money to struggling artists who may or may not deliver on time (hi, Poots!) Big studios can kiss my ass. And I say this as a fan of CDPR! I almost preordered CP2077, because I felt bad not paying full price for The Witcher 3. But then I remembered it just fucking encourages them. I’d rather have paid for a print copy of the artbook, to give them extra money. Ah well.
That's why I was excited about the online partffew years ago - imagine gtav but in night city, backed by CDPR? If done well it's be printing money for them and guarantee constant updates and improvements for us. Unfortunately it just wasn't meant to be it seems :/
Yeah, I’m loving AC6, but the design decisions that make the game so much better on the KB+M are actually kind of baffling from a console-first company like FROM. I played the hell out of the AC1 games back in the day and while that series’ aiming controls were a joke, the fact that you cycled through your ranged weapons instead of having all 3 accessible at the same time, combined with the fact that the game used only one button for “boost” which covered both jumping and dodging, meant the weapons and boosting actions fit nicely on the 4 face-buttons. Now, AC1’s weapons were very flawed in that there was often minimal reason to cycle through them - they didn’t generally have cooldowns or meters so putting a weapon away wasn’t super useful. Best strategy was a 1-weapon mech, generally. But still, the simpler controls were a lot more pleasant on a game controller.
And author is quite right about how rotation rate has grossly changed the game’s strategy and feel. For example, if somebody got behind you in old AC, the strategy was to get to cover while you ponderously rotate, or to burn energy like a fiend boosting backwards to get them into your cone of fire.
Not that I dislike AC6 - I love the game - but I hope this renewed interest in the AC series will lead us to a simplified spin-off or copycat 3rd-party game that properly fits onto the controller.
I just think there was some good gameplay lost.
But yeah, I’m playing it on KB+mouse, and I’m a PC gamer primarily.
Yes. Hated it. The flying mechanics were joyless, the plot was tedious, the weaker enemy units were harmless filler, and there were too many overly-scripted fights.
Molyneux is the Shyamalan of video games. He’s done a couple of brilliant things, some decent stuff, and a lot of batshit crazy cringe-fests.
New titles are like Christmas poppers. You look forward to them because you remember that first time they were fun, but then you crack one and remember they’re mostly a mix of disappointment and the faint waft of gunpowder.
I really like this comparison. Dude has publicly gone on record about how he regrets utilizing hype irresponsibly. I think acknowledgement is all we want, and plenty of people still like fable and black and white. I would root for him to have a bit of a comeback.
they require a massive dataset to do so. much much much more than an individual person’s playthrough
They actually suck at learning compared to us, in some ways. If I show you a car, and tell you, only once “this is a car” you will start recognizing other cars, of different sizes, colors and models, from any orientation.
Meanwhile, look at something like tesla cars. they have been gathering data for years, and the ai still has issues recognizing cars sometimes.
“I do think, though”, he concedes, “we have stumbled, and it feels like stumbling on a mechanic that has never been seen in a game before.”
“And a lot of this is very mystical because I’m trying to avoid to tell you what it’s like. But it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience”
I’m not really familiar with those games, only with the infamousness of molyneux, but wasn’t the player’s actions leaving behind a pretty clear effect on the world a common theme in those games? That may have been what he was referring too.
It may also be him naming those because those games were the heights that he wants to go back to. The games he had made when he was still relevant must be much more present in his mind than they are in ours.
it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience
Based on this description and given the only thing two of these games have in common, I can only conclude his latest project is a game focused on using your floating god hand to slap the shit out of your minion(s). I’m just not quite sure about the Fable connection…
Molyneux’s great sin is the inability to shut the fuck up while he’s ahead. lt’s hard to explain how much weight this guy carried in the 90s/very early 00s but he was the guy that did Populus, Dungeon Keeper, and Syndicate. And then he just kept over-promising and fucking up for a whole decade.
If he’d kept it reasonable he might still carry some of that weight but he cannot stop promising the moon and then delivering mediocre shit. It would be like Miyamoto releasing flappy bird with NFTs instead of the next Zelda game. God he’s so frustrating.
Most of “his” genuinely good games seem to deliver despite him, not because of him. Beyond his ability to deceive enough investors/gamers to get funding for other people to pull something good from the fire he creates, what else does he do.
Only this motherfucker could make a blockchain based product in 2023 and think he’s still ahead of the curve (and not, y’know, turning up to buy tickets on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg).
Don’t bite off more than you can chew with the sequel, or you’re just going to repeat history. I liked the game since launch, but it was still very evident CDPR wanted to do more than they realistically could while still actually releasing a product.
Great vision, perhaps too much; but poorly managed their time and resources. Stretched too thin on portability to every available console at the time of release. Constant changes of scope. Etc.
Just do like Baldur’s Gate and release a portion as early access, then release the full game on all platforms when it’s ready. Ideally skip early access and just release when it’s actually ready, but the early access option is acceptable.
Honestly part of the benefit of early access is the diverse hardware and diverse playstyles being tested. I’m sure part of BG3’s success was due to them taking feedback and bug reports from the early access players that submitted things and implementing the fixes and changes based on customer feedback. It definitely gives unique insight for the developers while the game is still being made.
As time went on, he developed a reputation for big promises and hype and underdelivering - viewed by some as straight up lying. He arguably killed the Fable brand. He presented a tech demo for the launch of the Kinect that was thought to be a real game, that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Following Fable 3’s poor reception, he makes his own company and hypes up “Curiosity”, essentially a bad clicker game with a promised prize to the person who gets the final click. The tech was bad, and the “prize” was supposedly a share of the revenue from their following project Godus. That project was not good (which was only expected to be at all due to his penchant for inflating expectations), and the cherry on top was that the person who won the prize for the aforementioned Curiosity game never received a dime.
A bad clicker game that you could pay money into to make your clicks worth more, might I add. And I believe that the words “will change your life” was used to describe the prize. And that part of the prize was to play Godus early and they got bored pretty quickly of it.
And that part of the prize was to play Godus early and they got bored pretty quickly of it.
The guy didn’t even look like he had any interest in that kind of game to begin with. And, really, why would he? He’s just a random bloke who tried playing a brainless clicker game, and won the jackpot. There’s nothing that predestined the prize winner to be into any of this. Even Molyneux’s greatest hits in the god game/management genre are still *very" niche games.
Also yeah, Godus was a disaster on many, many levels and very far from those.
The whole thing was very flawed from the beginning.
Even if you know nothing about the past of this guy, the fact that he made a blockchain-based business sim should tell you all you need in order to form an opinion.
He exaggerates or straight up lies about the games he has made. Despite some of them being very good, they still under delivered on many outrageous claims Moleneux has made.
Like with Fable, he once said shit ranging from that you’d be able to do shit like carve your name in a tree and watch it grow and the scar evolve over time and even seemingly minor things like fighting a dragon as a boss which didn’t come to fruition.
Originally he was a well liked, well respected autuer game designer from back in the days when that was still a thing. He made games like Populous, and people thought he was pretty cool.
Around the time of Black and White, the cracks started to show. He had bought into his own hype, and had a real tendency to over promise and under deliver. But, even though it didn’t exactly match up to some of his more grandiose descriptions, Black & White was still a very good game, so people didn’t mind.
Fable was where things really went off the rails. The thing is, Fable was a very good game, a fun but largely quite contained RPG, feeling more like a western take on a Zelda game than anything (as in the N64 Zelda games).
But it was not the game that Molyneux promised. Not even slightly. The game he described was one that would have nearly photo realistic graphics, and a vast open world where you could literally see a distant mountain peak and set off to climb it. A world where you could kill a man in a duel, and his son would grow up dedicating their life to one day hunting you down and killing you. A world where you could conquer whole nations with armies of darkness at your command.
Think Skyrim crossed with Mount & Blade crossed with Crusader Kings crossed with Star Citizen. Now imagine that game releasing at the same time as Morrowind.
So by this point people were starting to understand that Molyneux was fundamentally incapable of a) reigning in his imagination, and b) operating in the modern world of game development.
And then we got to Curiosity. If you don’t know, it was a mobile game where all you did was tap on a big cube made of layers of little cubes. Every time you tapped on a little cube it got destroyed, and everyone was working together on this, so each cube was destroyed for everyone. The goal was to destroy all the layers and reveal the centre, and whoever destroyed the last layer would win a prize. Kind of dumb, very simple. But Molyneux, Molyneux hyped this to the heavens. This wasn’t just a “game”, oh no, this was a grand social experiment the likes of which the world had never seen before, and the winner would recieve something “truly life changing.” Molyneux hammered that point a lot. “Life changing.”
What they recieved was that a character would be named after them in Godus, the Kickstarter game Molyneux was making. Oh, and they’d get “a portion” of the revenue from the game (it was never publicly stated how big that portion would be).
That was back in 2013. Ten years later Godus is still in early access, backers are clamouring for refunds after basically none of the Kickstarter promises were met, and the winner of Curiosity has not been contacted by the company since 2016.
He has never seen a cent of the money he was promised.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne