Smaller studios have been consistently putting out good games as of late anyway. Indy and AA studios have the freedom to make fun things instead of having to check every box on a spreadsheet.
With the success of BG3, Larian has a great opportunity to strengthen their own IP. Their Divinity games were great but had pretty nonsensical world-building (to this day, I still have no idea how DOS and DOS2 are related plotwise), and one of the great things about BG3 was the fusion of Larian game design with an appealing fantasy world. If Larian can build up a coherent setting of their own, their future would be bright.
I have not played it myself but what I’ve seen of it looks at the very least polished and made with care. That being said there just wasn’t that much competition this year. The industry is overshadowed with mass layoffs and a smaller budget pool. And yes, of course some good games released, but nothing in the ballpark of a Baldur’s Gate 3 or GTA 5.
John Linneman from digital foundry said the game reminded him of why he loves games after all the AAA slop and UE5 games they’ve been through. Up there in quality with the Mario games.
As a game? Astrobot is a VERY solid and polished platformer.
But mostly it is the nostalgia and target demographic. If you ever had a PS1 or PS2 growing up then you will have insane amounts of nostalgia for all the costumes and easter eggs while not realizing most are from the late PS3/early PS4 anyway.
So… it is basically a modern Nintendo game. Others do platforming and level design better. But only this has the excessive amount of references to nu-God of War and rare reference to Jumping Flash that makes your heart remember the happy times.
And… even though I see it for what it is, I am not gonna pretend I am above it.
For what it is worth? I think it IS the better game than Balatro (one would hope so since it had a full major studio and platform holder behind it…). But I still think Balatro was THE game of 2024 just for how much it pervaded everything and everyone.
It’s a 100% perfect addition to THE core combat light puzzle platformer games. It also has an age range of 0-99 by both having cute jokes and references that would appeal to older folks while never being even remotely offensive.
Also yea, what else was there? Closest was make Wukong which primarily crushed the market because it again proved that the new or smaller studios can absolutely give a better AAA experience than the big studios these days by focusing on delivering a game not a storefront
I just bought it used for $45. Started 5 hours ago, now time to sleep, then play again.
It is a better super Mario game. The difficulty is a bit higher I think, there’s some platforming where I thought like “ain’t no way some of my friends would get this first try”
Not one bit. Sackboy is a 2d platformer, AstroBot is 3d. It feels like a Super Mario Galaxy 3 - better than 2 in every way. If AstroBot would have a wall jump and triple jump it totally would be a super Mario Galaxy 3.
That’s a tough decision to make, especially in today’s gaming marketing, but I applaud them for stepping back and recognizing what they had wasn’t good enough to sell. Blizzard made that decisions years ago with Starcraft Ghost, the Blizzard of today wouldn’t make that same call any more.
Steam suspicously absent from this conversation, but I’m willing to be patient and see.
It’s a positive attitude for Spencer to take, but would have to see it in practice to be able to make judgment on if he really stands behind those words or if he is simply making a strategic business decision whose real motives are simply masked by these words.
The latter is par for the course for corporations, so we don’t have a lot to lean on in favor of him truly holding these values, sadly. One can hope, however, that miracles can and do happen.
That’s not where Valve makes their money from though. Their money primarily comes from store purchases, so anything to expand Steam’s reach is better for them. Plus, keeping Steam as relevant and ubiquitous as possible will in turn promote sales of the Steam Deck. The Xbox and Steam Deck cater to fundamentally different use cases anyways.
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 as well as Divinity: Original Sin 2 were all huge successes and Baldur’s Gate 3 was in early access for 3 years to either test it or read testers opinions. So you’ve got a very successful IP using a renown system, a devoted studio known for quality games with proper resources and their own, capable and proven game engine, years of polishing the game and adhering to fans feedback. If you “completely understand why it wasn’t on the radar” then… I guess you could get a job at Microsoft.
Everyone knew BG3 would "a success," but it hasn't just been a success, it's been a nuclear bomb of a success.
Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the "hope we get there" number.
Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It's that level of joyful shock.
Estimates for Steam is roughly 4.9 million sales. That data comes from peak players, average weekly players, and achievement tracking information.
Estimates taken this way usually skew higher than they really are, but the data for the current active and peak player estimates look good. As they have dropped to a quarter of weekly players.
DOS2 has sold 5M copies over the life of it. BG3 has sold nearly 10M in the first month on steam alone. Probably close to 30M over the life of the game.
It’s several orders of magnitude more successful and easily the most successful CRPG ever. You all really are missing the scale.
They could have predicted more success than they probably did but I don’t get why your comment has so many downvotes, Larian itself prepared for 100k players at launch too, not over 800k so no one really predicted how much of a bomb this game would be!
I bought the game for science cause it was the only game so far using all major features of UE5 and is a good reference to see how they manage asset, etc to keep the game running at 60fps with provided spec.
I think it does have potential, the mechanic is tight enough(the kbm default binding is not good, needs some rebind to make the combat flow more fluid), frame pacing is smooth majority of time(you have jitter mostly when it switch between cutscenes<->game), pretty much checked all the boxes and doesn’t feel lacking when playing the game.
BUT, it does have poor marketing plan and kinda bad luck in releasing window. It’s a good “alt shooter game” IMO.
It also requires EA's always-online DRM like the recent Star Wars Jedi games. Steam needs to make that notification bigger so I know not to buy that sort of trash.
You mean denuvo? I think it’s a money sinker now so might as well remove it at this point. But it’s EA’s call. Also, yes I have to download EA’s launcher as well.
And EA's launcher requires an active internet connection. Try playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, because I sure did, and it doesn't work. There may be a way to sidestep the launcher, particularly on older games like this one that had the launcher retrofitted into it after launch, but regardless, it tells me to stop buying EA games.
I generally avoid denuvo and EA. I literally break this stance just to see what they did with UE5 but ended up enjoying the game as well. It sucks cause denuvo means I can’t hook up RenderDoc and see how they render a frame compare to stock UE5. The movement reminds me a lot of original Quakes(very close to Q3) where you can have lots of control mid air and really snappy movement speed with their mechanics(blinks and grapples). But yeah, if this game doesn’t have this “use all UE5 latest tech” tag I will probably not even know or touching it cause I don’t play shooters after like Battlefield 3. Cause I am old and I like fast arena shooter not modern slow pace CQB/battle pass shooter, I was quite disappointed after trying Halo Infinite. But, that said, any shooter fits my criteria, would probably fail in sales. ^^;
lol, I go take a look, yep, battlefield 3.(note, I have no idea when I added crysis, it’s probably from a bundle or something and it redeems directly. I had high hope when crysis 2 released. ) And yes, I did played 2042 open beta cause we had a company game day that picked the open beta.(and yep I don’t like it. )
Like which type of shooter is your thing?? For me it’s the quick arena/team shooter, my good shooter example would be Q3 and Tribes 2. I think it’s really satisfying when moving quickly and shoot people with actual projectiles, rocket/disc launcher in my examples. (not a fan of hit scan type)
Not quite Quake speed, though I enjoy Quake just fine too. For me, the sweet spot was stuff like Halo, 007, Metal Arms, Half-Life, Crysis, that sort of thing. But yeah, everything these days is an online-only, live service battle royale or extraction shooter.
Just ordered a second Ultimate 2c just in case on this news. Was considering the Ultimate 2 for gyro support but 8bitdo’s offering there is confusing and it’s unclear if it would actually work with my Steam Deck (apparently gyro only works in Switch mode?).
Correct, you will need to pair as a Switch controller (or usb dongle) for the Steam Deck to be able to see the gyro . I find I use the gyro less since it doesn’t have the capacitive thumpsticks for triggering gyro input.
Even if you own a Steam Deck, Nintendo has some attractive value. Nintendo essentially has a monopoly on at least 3 genres of videogame. The entire library of Steam doesn’t really have a casual racing game that can go toe-to-toe with Mario Kart. The same can be said for almost any Mario game. Even if a Steam Deck had the games, you’d need 2 decks or an extra controller to get the Switch-style experience. Valve isn’t really trying to compete with the Switch on its own turf.
This is very true. It's not just that Nintendo makes good games, it's that a lot of their games are wildly unlike anything else on the market. The reason I'm losing my mind over a Kirby Air Ride sequel is because there hasn't been any other game like the original from 2003. I've waited 22 years for another game that could scratch that itch.
Theoretically you can spin up a used thinkpad from a yard sale and run steam. Nintendo doesn’t (legally) run on anything that’s not Nintendo branded ¯_(ツ)_/¯
And theoretically you can install Windows on a Steam Deck. Not making something specifically unsupported doesn't mean you're not building your business model around the default use case.
For the record, Nintendo games can be legally run on an emulator, much as Nintendo may protest this. It's a pain in the ass to do so without technically breaking any regulation, but it sure isn't impossible, and the act of running the software elsewhere isn't illegal.
Yes but the act of dumping a game or acquiring it in any capacity is illegal (circumventing DRM measures) as well as running the game (which also requires circumventing DRM measures)
I will acknowledge that when it's tested in court. And I mean internationally.
The notion that copyright is absolute as long as the content is hidden behind any and all DRM is nonsensical, as is the assumption that literally any function not enabled to the user on purpose is illegal to use. I suspect the reason nobody has had to really defend that softmodding their console and dumping their owned keys and carts is legal is that no game maker, Nintendo included, wants to see how that goes in any way that would set a precedent.
I mean the hardware is at least decent. And they aren’t shitting out another one because they aren’t seeing the generation improvement in performance they wanted (its coming). If I buy a Steam Deck, I at least get capable hardware.
Nintendo last several generations of hardware are born anemic. They start behind where even close to the cutting edge is. Nintendo has long since gave up pushing any kind of interesting boundary with its hardware.
I can’t just download “SwitchOS” and throw it on some non-anemic hardware to get a decent experience.
As much as people want to project onto Steam the idea that its a walled garden, its not. It is a cultivated garden, but its not walled off. You can enter and leave freely.
I legitimately thought you were talking about Nintendo hardware there for a while.
As far as we can tell the Switch 2 seems like it's a bit ahead of the Deck, which is on the low end of the current batch of PC handhelds anyway. I don't think the quality of hardware is the differentiating factor here, one way or the other. I also don't think "anemic" was what the Switch felt like at launch. It was somewhere between the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, which was only slightly inadequate for a home console and incredibly bulky for a handheld in 2017. "Not pushing any interesting boundary" is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.
I have to say, it's a bit surprising to see all the hostility from... I don't know who this is. PC master race bros? Steam fanboys? You'd think that last group at least would have some fondness for the Switch, given it effectively invented the entire segment of modern hybrid handhelds. Not that I have a horse in that race, there are pros and cons of both, I own both and I think both are pretty great. The Deck effectively replaced the Switch on my rotation, then it got replaced by a Windows handheld and I assume the mix will lean slightly more towards the console end when then Switch 2 comes out, then swing back when newer PC handhelds come out. I am fine with that.
I find the last point interesting, though. What IS a "cultivated garden" platform? I don't know that I think of Steam in those terms at all. Steam is a software platform that just happens to be tied to someone else's hardware and OS and seems very unhappy about it. From the perspective of a PC user I think Steam's dominance is a problem. For one thing because my storefront of choice is GOG (screw DRM, thanks) and for another because the entire point of an open platform is competition. From the perspective of a console user Steam is... well, not that. It's a PC gaming thing, so I don't see it as direct competition in the fist place. Which I guess is why I'm more weirded out than anything else to see people taking sides this aggressively.
“Not pushing any interesting boundary” is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.
I mean its not. Nintendo, in ancient history, did actually push boundaries around hardware. Most console makers did. The switch did not represent that. The completely transformed their approach to hardware, to shift to weaker, cheaper hardware so that they don’t push themselves out of reach for their target market: children.
The steam deck was a real advance in that regard. The handhelds that have followed have also pushed further. That’s not at all what the Switch2 is. Its behind the starting point for things that were available a few years ago.
The hostility is that Nintendo products have developed from actually capable, latest capabilities things, to a ticket you need to have punched to play a brand of games. The franchised is being carried by fan-boy-ism, not anything that they are doing that are objectively good, or that advance the industry. Its annoying also, that they are constantly being white knighted.
It seems like you are mostly concerned about grinding your axe against steam.
I'm confused. The article you linked seems to very clearly agree with me:
In terms of performance, the Switch 2 is clearly more powerful than the Steam Deck before we even start talking about cooperation with NVIDIA, DLSS upscaling, and tighter game optimizations possible when developing for a fixed console hardware platform.
I mean, yeah, that tracks and is verifiable. It's a more power hungry APU (although admittedly on a larger node), it has more cores on both the CPU and GPU side, a higher resolution and framerate screen. Storage seems to fall somewhere between the cheaper and more expensive Deck models and, while it has less memory it's also... you know, a console, so there's presumably less overhead and the RAM itself is a bit faster, which is very relevant to APUs. The Switch 2 is built on Ampere, while the Deck is on RDNA 2. Both launched in 2020, but I think it's not controversial to say that Nvidia had the edge on both features and performance for that gen.
It is absolutely true that Nintendo traditionally latched on to older, less performant components paired with hardware investment elsewhere, but the Switch was a huge outlier there. If you consider it against handhelds it stood alone as the single most powerful one. Granted, the Vita was the closest comparison and that was a whole generation behind, but I can't stress enough how outclassed it is against the original Switch. The need to push a TV display from a mobile chipset ended up making the Switch a genuinely beefy handheld.
The Switch 2 is interesting because besides iterating on that requirement it also seems like a very deliberate response to the Deck and PC handhelds. It seems intentionally designed to be competitive against the current set of those. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Nintendo pushed the price and performance up a bit specifically for that reason, frankly. It seems egnineered specifically to not feel outdated at launch, even if it will presumably be outclassed again in a couple of years.
And for the record, I'm not "white knighting" Nintendo. They're famously ruthless, litigious and quirky bordering on unreasonableness. Not white knighting (or grinding an axe against) Valve, either. They're also ruthless and quirky bordering on unreasonableness, although clearly much, much better at PR with core gamers. I am actively hostile towards Nintendo's approach to a number of things (primarily emulation) and to Valve's approach to a number of things (primarily their gig economy approach to game development and their monopolistic tendencies). Not rooting for one of them doesn't mean I'm rooting against either of them, or that I don't acknowledge the things they do well or poorly.
polygon.com
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