This shouldn’t surprise anyone. When you look through the classics, they’re not “typical”. Hell, one of the most iconic games involves a plumber fighting a punk-rock turtle to save a princess, with a variety of mushrooms both helping and hindering.
With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.
You could make a game a third of the size of BG3, and it would still be excellent value for BG3’s asking price. And no, you shouldn’t attempt to make a competitor with BG3 on your first try. Nor should you try to make a competitor to Elden Ring on your first try; FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before. I do think more RPG developers should strive to follow the systems-driven approach that Larian has and be cognizant of what it is that we all like about BG3, but it can be sustainable if you don’t try to hit a home run on the first pitch.
FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before.
Longer, if we really want to get pedantic. King’s Field, the game and series that is now the spiritual predecessor to the Souls genre, is from 1994, so we could probably say they have been refining their own flavor of action RPG for over 30 years now.
Steam has something like this for split screen games. If one person owns the game the other player can stream their games and play split screen like they were together. Apparently over 13 thousand games support the feature: store.steampowered.com/search/?category2=44
I’ve tried this once with divinity original sin 2. With my internet connections slow upload there was unfortunately too much compression going on causing the game to look horrible
This isn’t new, but maybe it’s been forgotten since online matchmaking. The original Starcraft could be installed as the full version which required a CD and a CD key to run, or as a version that didn’t require a CD or a key and could only by used to join multiplayer games.
I remember the DS had a similar feature. You could connect to people nearby and they could download the game and play with you. It was super cool, and I hope this becomes more common.
Yup, me and my sister did occasional Pokemon battles/trading and Mario Kart races with each other using the Download Play or whatever it was called. I think even 3DS had it, or something similar to that effect. I just wish I had enough friends who actually played Pokemon back then, cause at my elementary school only one friend had a 3DS and played Pokemon. Everyone else was too busy trying to be “cool” and play GTA and CoD 😮💨
The baffling thing about RoP is that they had a budget multiple times greater than the Jackson movies and still made substantially worse looking armor and weapons.
Like, forget the scripting issues, how do you not just hire as many of the same companies as you can find?
I thought the first season had its moments but some of those armors… Oof.
That wasn’t the case. In 2023 dollars, the LotR trilogy had a budget of around $513 million, eventually resulting in about 12 hours of finished product. RoP has a budget of about $150m for around 9 hours. So the trilogy spent $42m per hour compared to RoP’s $16m per hour.
It’s very simple, really. The meteoric rise of the gaming industry is unparalleled in entertainment so of course it quickly attracted an entourage of greedy finance people with dollar bills in their eyes who wouldn‘t even think of touching a controller or even watch a game trailer. They‘re in it for the money and think in numbers and spreadsheets. That‘s the root of many problems plaguing AAA studios today.
You would think a game journalist would at least have heard of Luna though. Even when it was dead on arrival.
the problem is, they see the market like its a brand recognition situation, which pc gamers it isnt exactly that. PC gamers are very incentive based buyers and will opt for something else if the incentive is “worth it” for them. the problem is, most platforms are really terrible at generating this incentive for consumers. GOG does with drm. free content, and to a lesser extent, epic does it with free games and tight unreal integration.
I’ll give an example that wont happen because someone looking at the numbers wont let it happen. Amazon for example could easily develop a propietary media reader, and invest in a physical media printing line, and basically become the defacto publisher for physical pc releases if they wanted to, giving PC players a HUGE incentive on buying on their platform (enabling the buying, selling, and trading of used games on pc), and could easoly also be the platform that buy/sells used copies. we all just know they wont because they dont want any of the risk and cost associated on doing so.
If Gaben wasn’t in it for the money, he wouldn’t be able to afford a fleet of 6 mega yatchs worth 1 billion and costing him 100 million per year just to maintain. He grabs 30% and enjoys his soft monopoly just like every other big videogame store.
A lot of that 30% goes to things other digital stores aren’t even close to offering. Also, if your game does well enough the cut Steam takes is lowered, albeit this only really happens for very successful games.
pcgamer.com
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