The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.
It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.
Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.
That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.
If you want to know about crap licenses to movies, there was a 8bit game for Blade Runner, but the developers couldn’t obtain the rights to do it. However, they were able to gain the rights to another part of the film.
The box art for the Blade Runner game states in rather small text on the cover, “video game interpretation of the film score”. Yes, they got the rights to the soundtrack!
Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.
Yeah, this looks awful to use. It’s okay on the Deck because that’s a mobile device and has a lot of functions it needs to satisfy on the go. For a dedicated controller? Why the hell would you prefer this over the better ergonomically designed SC 1 or literally any other console controller?
The original Steam Controller was great for games that didn’t support gamepads… and came out within like a year of “hey, we can actually map CRPGs, grand strategies, and RTSes to gamepads pretty well apparently?”
The Steam Deck is awesome because it is a best of both worlds. Sticks for games that map to those and trackpads for navigating the OS/Steam and for games that don’t map well to sticks. And a gamepad form of the Steam Deck would be awesome, if only for letting those of us with fewer brain cells to only learn one scheme for a game rather than two or three.
This… is not that. Mechanically it is there (and it is a good ad for pcbway or whatever) but the ergonomics are just complete trash. The Steam Deck itself has shockingly awesome ergonomics (and is a great isometric exercise because that thing is a brick) because it is like holding a large hardcover book. Shrink that down and you are just straining your wrists . It is why basically every gamepad has flared “wings” these days. It softens the angle of your wrist while you hold it.
All fair points. I can definitely see the appeal of wanting the same functionality that the Deck controller brings, as I myself really enjoy the extra flexibility the trackpads and back buttons provide. But the ergonomics in this example just looks awful and feels really reminiscent of the original Xbox controller.
You can get them secondhand, that’s not the issue. What would be the point of making a Steam controller from Steam controller parts? We already have that.
They have mechanical components that will wear out over time (though I suppose some people probably use them lightly enough that it’s less of an issue).
Mostly just that they’re not longer being produced and the second-hand supply is dwindling. Also the bumpers are prone to breaking and a USB-C port would be nice.
Hell, they are almost designed to break. They are utterly shabby in terms of build quality.
I was one of the early adopters going back to November 2015
I am not lying when I tell you I have been through 17 of these controllers. It’s the right bumper almost every time.
I have a giant handful of the dongles. I was saving them thinking they would go up in value but now like $2 knockoffs are available LOL
Edit: the first one I received, out of the box, had a broken face button membrane. The replacement I received had a non-functioning back right paddle. The replacement for that had a non-functioning R shoulder and you could hear the plastic crunching on each press. That’s just the first three I received and I’m not counting those in the 17 that I destroyed in my own hands.
They were built like absolute shit. After the first run got sold and they shored-up manufacturing problems, they got marginally better but the fundamental underlying issue never was solved.
If it wasn’t such a wonderful controller, I would have stomped the first one into powder and never looked back.
Totally fair take. What they lack in durability they more than make up for in ergonomics and control customization features.
I’ve got a total of 8 of them with only 2 busted bumpers. I’d say that’s not terrible considering they went through 1000+ hours of the Souls series plus Sekiro.
For me, I want one with internal rechargeable (and replaceable) batteries, more reliable Bluetooth, and multi-device targeting (ie those 1,2,3 toggles you see on stuff like mouse/keyboards - I use mine on my Steam Deck and also on my desktop - dont want to mess with pairing each time. Plus if I end up with with a Switch 2, the trackpad would be interesting for mouse mode if those could connect (no idea)).
it doesn’t let me charge and play at the same time
I could hot swap in and out batteries, but it doesn’t report battery percentage
It also doesn’t auto-pause when the battery dies, like other systems do
It runs through them quickly
it acts finicky/unpredictable when the battery is very low, rather than reaching a consistent threshold and stopping working
In combination with a bug/anti-feature I’ve posted about previously, my Steam Deck sees it as a new controller every time the batteries are replaced, despite the Bluetooth MAC/BDA not changing.
Fair enough. I much prefer swapping them every few hours rather than using a wire, and I haven’t had those identification problems you describe. Largely comes down to setup and usage profile it seems.
Rechargeables get stuck and are waaaay harder to remove than regular because they’re just a bit bigger. I have solved this with a loop of sticky tape around the batteries so I got a bit of a pull tab when using them.so it works…but not perfectly
The Deck’s controls. The Steam Controller was a bit too drastic of a change for me. It’s great for games not designed for a controller but having no D-pad and only a single analog stick is a deal breaker for most people who get a controller to play games designed for controllers.
why are people hating on a builder who designed something that a large number of gamers want? This can possibly be the catalyst for valve do give us that sweet pus*-controller we all want. I know I do! I use both my steam deck as controllers and it’s awesome. This video is inspiring
Yes, it is better to have incentives tied to metacritic scores and units sold rather than… your actual existence.
But it is still the same bullshit. That is even worse in the era of chud influencers looking for the latest game to blame all the sins of the world on.
This article is basically the equivalent of “In rare economic W, man succeeds in using bootstraps to climb out of The Pit”
As the article says, this should be the norm, not the exception, but how can we expect it to become the norm if they don’t even get positive press for it?
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
No. This shouldn’t be the norm. How “successful” a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait… the CEO doesn’t have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.
I’ll also add on that this kind of model actively penalizes long tail games and post release support.
The poster child of this being Terraria. According to wikipedia, it was basically the indy dev darling of the year… 2011. Getting 70-80% from different outlets. And while we don’t know those initial sales figures, we do know that… 14 years later it continues to sell well enough that there will probably never be an actual final final patch. Like, the world will have cooled down from all the nuclear war and, somehow, there will be another re-release of Skyrim and another “final for reals this time” content drop for Terraria.
I agree with all of your points, but if we don’t even shine a positive light on steps in the right direction, then what are we supposed to do? Wait until we’re in a utopia, then start acknowledging improvements?
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so I’d still say worth celebrating.
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so is still say worth celebrating.
It is a “positive step” up from the hellscape that has been used to underpay and screw over devs for decades now.
I get we all want to feel good and not have to give a shit about actual labor issues and compensation of workers. But… this is just the kind of shit that makes it even easier to continue abusing the people who make the games we love and make sure that the golden parachute upper level managers get to have 500 person studios all on the back of having been at a meeting for a successful game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well. If they get a material reward for the big windfall they helped their employer get, that’s a good thing. You could argue they deserve pay raises instead, and I’d be inclined to agree, but then we’re agreeing on the principle and just quibbling over the extent.
Its not a false dilemma, devs getting the boot after release is fairly common in this industry. Also not sure why you keep bringing it back to chuds and bigots, since that has nothing to do with the topic.
Guess what impacts sales figures and even metacritic scores these days?
Assholes like asmongold. Because getting your game review bombed and having all the twitch streamers checking out your game have their unpaid moderators run triple time because they didn’t sticky a clip of them calling the character generator “woke trash”? That severely impacts sales. And Games Media is in a horrible state and the more corporate outlets (but also even a lot of the independent ones) just aren’t going to want that smoke for daring to say a game was fun if it is the latest “culture war” game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well.
There is a reason that it has increasingly become a good practice to refer to “total compensation”. Because, yeah, everyone loves getting told by the CEO that they are essential and saved the company and are awesome and everybody gets a day off … but only if they give the CEO time to peel out in his new ferrari first. But the reality is that that is baked into the expected salary and you are effectively taking a pay cut any year you don’t meet those arbitrary criteria… which are almost always never something YOU have any control over.
And you know who DOESN’T get a pay cut in the years where half your department got fired on a Thursday?
Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.
That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don’t have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.
I mean if you think a system doesn’t work well it’s because you are able to identify why it isn’t working well and can visualize somewhat of an alternative. If that isn’t the case then you cannot be fully sure that there is a better way to do things, and maybe the system is working as well as it can be given the environment the system needs to operate in.
I’m not a dev myself so I can’t speak too much about the pov of being a worker in the industry and the issues you describe with credits. But from a management perspective the problem is that it is simply not possible to accurately predict which games will have a long tail. So if you plan for a long tail and the game isn’t received as well as you expected, what happens then? The game makes a loss. The studio might need to close because they overcommitted resources to the project etc. it’s much safer to assume that all the sales will happen in the first 6 months and forecast for that, and if the game turns out to be more successful than expected then that’s free money basically from a planning POV.
The intention of live service games is pretty much that, creating games that will purposefully and predictably have long tails, but the problem is that even if a game is designed to have a long tail it doesn’t mean that it will find an audience that will give it the momentum needed in the first place.
As for bonuses being tied to reviews or sales, they both have pros and cons. Maybe it should be a little bit of both, because well received game might make lackluster sales while a badly received game might make crazy sales numbers (most AAA games).
As for getting review bombed or getting panned by influencers. That is always a risk in every industry. I find that most games get the reception they deserve, For example a lot of people want to frame the latest Dragon Age for flopping because of chuds, but that is not in fact the case, because those same chuds probably sunk hundreds of of hours into BG3 which is by all chud metrics also a “woke” game. So the problem, very often is the quality of the game. Chuds are more than willing to put up with politics they don’t like in games when the game is objectively (subjective to the expectations of the intended audience) good.
Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren’t tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a “dark maga” hat to the keighelys and the game craters.
And… fuck the managers. They are already doing great.
I mean you could make a studio where there is no manager (how does that work I’m not sure) and you’d still need to make financial forecasting if you want the studio to be an entity that continues to exist. Like I don’t understand your logic here, the only other alternative is to make everyone’s salary contingent to sales and then the pie is divided evenly like in a coop model but that means a lot more of the financial risk is shouldered by the devs and you probably don’t get paid until the game releases.
Like what is a proper alternative that: a) pays you a salary while the game is being developed b) accounts for the risk inherent with not knowing the future?
They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.
But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn’t do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.
I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play “wrong” for like 16 hours.
I think Team Ninja screwed the pooch on other aspects of it (basically every single enemy does nothing but delayed attacks…) but I still think Rise of the Ronin set the bar for what a parry should be in the 2020s: Triggerable from block so you have minimal penalty to mistiming it for all but the perilous attacks. And Clair Obscura is similarly awesome for tightly coupling the parry and dodge timings so you can learn a fight with perfect dodging before switching to perfect parries for maximum punishment.
If whiffing a parry means I lose half my health bar (cough Dark Souls cough) I am never going to use it. If whiffing a parry means I take chip damage or if I can practice my timing with a safe defensive mood? I’ll be grinning like a beast as I clown on the heroes/“heroes” of the Bakumatsu.
But yeah. I REALLY enjoyed Lies of P even if I think the last 3 or so bosses are… kind of genuinely bad (two puzzle bosses in a row is also a real bad feeling). Still need to get around to the DLC but I am INCREDIBLY interested in what the next major game from that studio is. But I wouldn’t encourage anyone who doesn’t vibe with LoP to try again (well… maybe with the new rebalance patch?).
Yeah I’d be a bit shocked if you could dodge your way through the final boss of the DLC. There are some attacks I think need to be dodged, but they feel like the exception, not the rule.
Like I said, the DLC is still on my todo list but assuming it follows the Bloodborne DLC difficulty (it sure as hell is following the Bloodborne DLC concept and narrative…)? Yeah, I would be amazed.
But I did watch a video of someone dodging to beat the real end boss of the core game which I similarly thought was nigh impossible. And it is incredibly brutal with basically a need for fairly perfect play just to do chip damage. So… sickos gonna sicko.
Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.
Hopefully Valve will decide to release their Ibex soon. I do like that this is a split controller, but the ergonomics don’t look great compared to the leaked Ibex image.
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