Stumbles ass first into giving creative control of their property to one of the most devoted and talented studios of the decade, leading to a wildly successful and popular game.
“That’s great! Let’s give it to someone else!” - some stupid ass exec who can only see ahead one financial quarter at a time.
I thought Larian themselves didn’t want to make another one? Could be wrong though but it would make sense for them to use their surge in popularity to create something that they wholly own.
While I respect Larian’s right to turn down another time intensive game like Baldur’s Gate…I do worry about the same thing you are concerned about: A shitty executive that only cares about cash and not art! A love for art and appreciating great storytelling is what made Baldur’s Gate 3 the breakout hit. The AAA industry is too shortsighted to be capable of creating such a marvel like BG3, though they occasionally stumble into success without understanding why. They won’t let their teams cook and, it’s very likely, their creatives have either moved on to another studio or became a stress casualty (Bioware’s own term).
Larian probably wouldn't have turned it down if Hasbro hadn't fired pretty much everyone who worked with Larian on BG3. Sven Vincke (CEO of Larian) seems like the kind of guy who would take such an action personally, which is probably why he doesn't want to work with Hasbro again and rightfully so, fuck Hasbro.
His team was also burnt out after working on BG3 after such a long time, Sven respected the wishes of his team over the lure of making more money. It’s important to remember, Sven actually cares about the team he’s assembled over short term profit. Screw Hasbro any day of the week is such a mood, but, not an inciting incident that lead to Sven making his choice.
Outer Wilds is so good. A perfect game for Switch. And the DLC included too, which was also superb.
Pity they can’t release a way to erase the game from my memory so I can play it afresh. Half the point of the game (and DLC) is just figuring out what the game is. Because I already know what to do I’d just complete it in about 10 minutes so it’s sadly not worth me picking it up again.
But anyone who hasn’t played it, please give it a go. It’s just wonderful.
I played about 3 hours of it and didn’t like it. Everyone talks about how great it is and how it’s a once in a lifetime game, but it just wasn’t that enjoyable to me. I might revisit it one day, but we’ll see.
It's not like many (any?) other games, not in the mainstream sphere anyway.
I made the mistake of trying to play with mouse and keyboard but once I got flying with a controller I was set.
I still played with mouse and keyboard just fine. I wish they had finer thrust control for that one part, but it just made more sense to me as a first-person and space sim game.
It’s not for everyone. You have to actually learn what the game is telling you from text, little physics interactions, and more. Nothing is completely spelled out for you, and everything you accomplish is a result of diligent understanding on your part.
Oh my god, I don’t have a headset anymore, but there was a VR mod for it that I absolutely fucking loved. It was one of the things that the Index was made for. I spent so much time crashing into planets in VR.
I’ve been hesitant to play it because I heard it’s existentially depressing and I don’t think my mental state is in a good place to deal with that. Otherwise I’d probably give it a go. I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and many people who love one of those games seem to also love the other.
I don’t know, slight spoilers for the general mood, but, outer wilds is that, but it’s more like… wistful, or melancholic, or bittersweet. It’s sad, but it’s a good sad. It’s emotional, and emotions feel good.
I feel like, if I were in a bad place when playing that, I don’t think it would have made it worse. It might have made it more meaningful, and be kinda… nice, in a sense. But I also feel like art like that help me a lot when I am in bad places. It’s kinda like seeing beauty in sadness, right?
It’s hard because it depends on the type of melancholy. I get what you mean about wistful melancholy and “good sad” if the stories are on the smaller scale. Human tragedy, personal failure, doomed relationships, lost love, that sort of stuff.
I have a harder time dealing with elaborations on an existential level: the ultimate end of all things, the futility of existence, the meaninglessness of life etc. I’m hesitant because I’ve gotten the impression this is the sphere Outer Wilds operates in.
It’s a kind of hopeful nihilism, a sort of sense that no matter how far apart you are in space or time, everyone and everything is ultimately connected, and looking up at the same stars.
You should try the talos principle 2. They’re not apples to apples, but I’d guess that most who loved outer wilds would like it. The first talos principle is also good, but far less refined than the second.
The outerwilds dlc does add a fair bit of content. Although, I really don’t like jump scares so the dlc was not my favorite.
Massively overrated game. I thought it’d be an adventure game, but it turned out to be a timed puzzle game where you end up just rushing back to the same spot over and over again because the game kills you when times up. and you don’t even know if what you’re doing is correct. By the time you figure out this isn’t an adventure game it’s too late to return it for a refund.
That’s not really a problem with the game, but with your expectations. If I watch the film Alien expecting a comedy but it’s actually a horror I wouldn’t complain the film is overrated and not funny.
Pity they can’t release a way to erase the game from my memory so I can play it afresh.
That’s why people watch playthroughs to see somebody else go through the game for the first time. There’s an “Interloper” Discord server for people who are looking for VODs or live playthroughs.
While I haven’t played Outer Wilds, I with I could erase Witcher 3 from my mind. Going back for a second play through is a bit more tedious as I already know the storyline. Only completing secondary quests is somewhat fulfilling, but they end quickly. And after a point you’ve leveled up so much pretty much all combat becomes a bore.
Damn, that’s unfortunate. I’m glad Steam is cooperating though—a lot of platforms would try and bury this.
I hope this ends up being a blessing in disguise for them. Heart-wrenching to lose 10 years to a project and see little return because of a bug you’re not even responsible for.
The article says that Valve is only going to make the game a Daily Deal for a single day. The polygon commenters have it right, why not make it a week?
Why not buy 138,000 copies, one for each user that wishlisted the game, and give those out gratis? At $15 per copy, that's only 2 million dollars. That's a pittance for a company the size of Valve.
I think they should make it a daily deal, but not for a week. They should also eat the discount cost, which they apparently aren’t doing, and entirely waive their cut.
What I think they should do instead of extending the deal, is reset the games launch.
There is absolutdly no reason Valve couldn’t re-launch the game, along with all the algoritm benefits an unbugged 1.0 launch should have had.
Also, you seem to have missed that the article says they are contractually obligated to complete their current WIP game. Valve giving them a bunch of money would not give them time to work on further updates for Planet Centauri before then.
Eighteen months ago, I was an advocate for Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, because I didn’t think anybody could have done a worse job than Bobby Kotick.
Phil Spencer has proven me wrong. This arsehole tried to shut down Tango Gameworks after they literally shadowdropped a critically acclaimed GOTY contender.
Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.
It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they’re so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.
Same with EA. It’s just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they’ve closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.
Maybe that’s part of the problem? HDR implementation on my Samsung sets is garbage, I have to disable it to watch anything. Too bad too, because the picture is gorgeous without it.
Smart TV having absolutely horrible default settings and filters that ruin any viewing experience has little to do with HDR because the TV isn‘t even processing HDR images most of the time. That stuff is already mixed and there‘s not much any device can do to give you details in the darks and brights back. It‘s a much different story when you‘re actually processing real color information like in a video game. HDR should absolutely help you see in the dark here.
I WISH it was the default settings. I went through every calibration and firmware update I could find. Even the model specific calibrations on rtings.com. Nothing made a difference.
It appears to just be a flaw in Samsung’s implementation. After going through all the Samsung forum information, the only suggestion that’s guaranteed to work is “turn it off”.
I got a samsung monitor last year too (it was the cheapest hdr option and I keep seeing reddit praise them) and it has such a terrible hdr experience. When hdr is on either dark colors are light grayish, brights are too dark, darks are crushed, everything’s too bright or colors are over saturated. I’ve tried every combination of adjusting brightness / gamma from the screen and/or from kde but couldn’t figure out a simple way to easily turn down the brightness at night without some sort of image issue popping up. So recently I gave up and turned hdr off. Still can’t use the kde brightness slider without fucking up the image but at least the monitor’s brightness slider works now.
Also if there are very few bright areas on the screen it further decreases its overall screen brightness, which also affects color saturation bcz of course.
Also also just discovered freesync and vrr are two different toggles in two different menus for some fucking reason and if you only enable freesync like I did you get a flickering screen
I really wish there was a ‘no smart image fuckery’ toggle in the settings.
I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.
And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.
That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.
If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/
These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.
When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).
See my “set 2” links above. (at the time) $3,200 8K television, “If you want the brightest image possible, use the default Dynamic Mode settings with Local Dimming set to ‘High’, as we were able to get 1666 nits in the 10% peak window test.”
Nope, it does have wide color gamut and high-ish brightness, wouldn’t buy unless reviews said it was ok. But it does some fuckery to the image I can only imagine could be to make non-hdr content pop on windows but ends up messing up the image coming from kde. I can set it up to look alright in either in a light or dark environment but the problem is I can’t quickly switch between them without fiddling with all the settings again.
Compared to my cooler master a grayscale gradient on it has a much sharper transition from crushed bright to gray but then gets darker much slower as well, to a point where unless a color is black it appears darker on the cm despite it having an ips screen. Said gray also shows up as huge and very noticable red green and blue bands on it, again unlike the cm which also has banding but at least the tones of gray are similiar.
Also unrelated but just noticed while testing the monitors, max sdr brightness slider of kde seems to have changed again. Hdr content gets darker on the last 200 nits while sdr gets brighter. Does anyone know anything about that? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work
3 months edit: I might’ve been wrong about this. At the time I had both monitors connected to the motherboard (amd igpu) since the nvidia driver had washed out colors. Since the cooler master worked I assumed the amd drivers were fine. But a while back I ended up plugging both into the nvidia gpu and discovered that not only were the nvidia drivers fixed, but with it the Samsung didn’t have the weird brightness issue neither.
Edit edit: Even though the brightness is more manageable it’s still fucked. I’ve calibrated it with kde’s new screen calibration tool and according to it the brightness tops out at 250 nits. However it is advertised and benchmarked to go up to 600 and I’ve measured 800 ish using my phone sensor, and it looks much brighter than an sdr 200 nit monitor. Which makes me think even though it is receiving hdr signal, it doesn’t trust the signal to be actually hdr and maps sdr range to its full range instead; causing all kinds of image issues when the signal is actually hdr.
And just to make sure it’s not a linux issue I’ve tried it with windows 10 too. With amd gpu hdr immediately disables itself if you enable it and with nvidia gpu if you enable hdr all screens including ones not connected to it turn off and don’t work until you unplug the monitor and reboot. Cooler master just works
Yeesh sounds like your monitors color output is badly calibrated :/. Fixing that requires an OS level calibration tool. I’ve only ever done this on macOS so I’m not sure where it is on Windows or Linux.
Also in general I wouldn’t use the non-hdr to hdr conversion features. Most of them aren’t very good. Also a lot of Linux distros don’t have HDR support (at least the one I’m using doesn’t).
It’s one of those things where it looks good where in like the case of a video game, the GAME’s implementation of it is good AND your Console/PCs implementation is good AND your TV/Monitor’s implementation is good. But like unless you’ve got semi-deep pockets, at least one of those probably isn’t good, and so the whole thing is a wash.
“It was pretty much done, it was in final [quality assurance testing],” Free Radical founder and former studio director Steve Ellis told GamesIndustry.biz in 2012. “It had been in final QA for half of 2008, it was just being fixed for release. LucasArts’ opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing, and they’re right. But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big. They effectively canned a game that was finished.”
They also say the controller mapping is a challenge in the emulation software, but doable. It’s the wii version so I bet the aiming and whatnot is going to be wonky when using a controller or kbm vs the other releases.
Worth noting that the wiimote just uses Bluetooth, so it doesn’t take any specialized equipment to connect to your computer. And Dolphin has built in support for it. The sensor bar was also just a pair of infrared LEDs; All of the actual “sensing” happened at the wiimote directly. So you can just throw a wireless sensor bar (like $15 on amazon) underneath your computer monitor, and it will work fine.
So… now that we’ve got our series to finally get the love it deserves, spent 3+ years polishing and making the game the way the fans have all been clamoring for for years. We are now ready to mass produce, copy/paste the formula until we kill the franchise so spectacularly no one asks us to make another.
It really is a bloodbath in the tech sector. I don’t understand where these thousands of people are even going to go considering major companies are on hiring freeze
My pipe dream is a bunch of new indie studios forming out of all these layoffs and kicking publisher‘s asses on sales with new competent and passionate games.
…But I guess they‘d then probably sell to those publishers again and repeat…
The largest factor is lack of capital, which is something everyone is enduring due to the SVB collapse. This is a giant recession of the entire sector and I don’t see how it corrects any time soon.
While breathing is cool, I have some hope that it will start correcting this year or next.
The big thing is that the raised interest rates have helped to prevent a real recession. So the real question is when can they come back down. I hope it starts this year even though it’ll likely take years to go back to what they were pre-pandemic, if the go that low again.
It was pretty bad for a long time, but once they started letting users make their own hats and body models and shit, it got absurd. At least the games are usually just ripoffs, but the user-made catalog is just full of straight up model rips. I don't understand how they're not getting sued to oblivion for openly making money off of copyrighted material like that.
polygon.com
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