How many video game franchises are making the leap to tv/movies these days? Hint, it’s the ones with narrative driven, story rich games.
Go ahead and make pay to win mobile games, I don’t play them and they rake in millions so it makes perfect business sense.
But the idea that gamers don’t pay for good narrative driven, story rich games is laughable.
I think the biggest problem with a lot of game franchises have is they only sell the game. So much money is being left on the table with the best efforts being a screengrab lazily printed on a cheap shirt that sells maybe one or two.
If I could get some official, quality, Umbrella/Shinra/Arasaka/Faro corporation mugs, phone covers, meme tier shirts etc I’d be all over it.
They don’t sell enough. These companies want endless growth and endless sales so they can milk the whales for endless revenue. Narrative rich, story driven games don’t sell as much as pay to win or gacha trash.
I think the title of the article is misleading a bit. According to the article, the game has been in development since 2018 and they’ve been having issues they cannot seem to be able to fix to their satisfaction and it sounds like it’s more viable for the studio to abandon the project than try to fix it by throwing more money and time at it. And it’s a console game, so that limits their market, too.To me, reading the article, “narrative driven games don’t sell anymore” is not the main problem.
Good on dunkey for publishing such a good game instead of trying to profit on his popularity with mediocre one, I hope he continues giving the spotlight to more amazing indie games
I understand why they are, but now that CP2077 is more stable I’m going to miss red engine. It gives night city such a unique feel, and I worry unreal is going to make it feel like all the other unreal games. I’m not a game engineer so I’m assuming that will be much easier, but still, will miss it
The only reason why an Unreal game looks like an Unreal game is because the developers just use the default settings for environmental lighting and LUTs.
If your intention is to make a game with a specific look you can absolutely create your own lighting and LUTs. You can make an Unreal game look like whatever you want.
I loved acts 1 and 2. But, somehow I made it through those without any mention of the names Gortash or Orin, so for them to show up at the end of act 2 and suddenly THIS is the bigger bad beyond ketheric was…weird. and then, the transition into act 3 felt very poorly executed, suddenly Gortash is THE head Duke of all of baldurs gate? Whyls dad is now mind controlled and there was no option to prevent that from happening? Just felt a little railroady after all the branching upon branching of the first two acts
I’m telling this because I assume you have finished the game: Gortash is related to Karlach’s backstory so you can get some hints from before, and Orin is related to Dark Urge’s backstory so yeah, same.
IIRC you also hear about Gortash from Councilor Florrick in the Last Light Inn. She says she’s going to ask him for help against Ketheric.
I also remember reading about Gortash and Orin while rummaging through Ketheric’s things in Moonrise. They definitely were not featured prominently but they were hinted at if you go looking!
You have pictures and visions of the 3 leaders from the goblins. In the ruined town and in the goblin fortress. They are hints for gortash and orin in various other places too.
That’s not an issue, that’s an rpg: the ability to make different choices (informed and uninformed) leads to different experiences and different events each with knockon effects for thr story. It’s only a problem if the game isn’t clever enough to account for all of the different things you’ve done.
There are hints of the cult of Bhaal and Gortash taking over all over acts 1 and 2. I just found a note in act 1 in the entry to the zent basement talking about Gortash. The goblins talk about their 3 leaders, and you quickly understand that they’re not the goblin, the drow and the hobgoblin.
Ketheric was merely the first step, and saving the duke comes in act 3. There are many pathes to save him or not. Really that’s not railroad that’s happening, that’s vilains having more in their bag that you’d hope for.
These are good vilains, and it is a good story. Far better than a story that doesn’t move forward and has its vilains protected by scenarium.
I haven’t played it myself (yet) but apparently Divinity Original Sin 2 was similar and the “Definitive Edition” that came about a year later fixed Act 3. So I hope the same thing happens for BG3.
What part exactly is a spoiler? That you can fight Raphael? Something that anyone can intuit the moment you meet the character. That the game comes in three acts? That the game has an ending?
Basically everything including and past Gortach becoming the Duke. I’m in the beginning of Act 3 and had no idea there was a Raphael fight until your comment.
Talking about plot points in the last act of the game, yes, is going to be a spoiler.
Sorry, I conflated your comment with the reply to yours which is full of spoilers.
I still had no idea that there was a Raphael fight until you brought it up. Anything in Act 3 is pretty much a spoiler, since it only just came out on PS5 and a lot of folks won’t have gotten there yet. Just be a little more vague with the details if you don’t want to use tags. Not everyone has finished the game yet.
Larian is largely getting a free pass for an unoptimized mess in act 2 and 3. Pent up demand for a good CRPG has made a lot of gold completely ignore the very obvious issues.
I think they make a valid point that there’s a difference between critique and criticism.
$70 is a lot to spend on a game for most people, so people want to feel they got their money’s worth, but you have to admit that the internet does have a bad habit of turning everything into hyperbole.
Still, a company with a multiple million dollar budget should be able to produce something truly amazing, especially when there’s indie devs and publishers that make truly memorable gems for what’s a comparatively shoestring budget.
If the big companies want to have more critiques and less criticism, perhaps they should start listening to players instead of producers.
People could avoid paying $70 for bad games by not preordering. Like seriously, it takes maybe two hours after release for the criticism to start pouring in.
With physical copies of games essentially being non-existent, there is absolutely no point in pre-ordering a game. Hold on to your money, and wait for reviews.
There’s a difference between being unhappy about a game and making your voice heard to the studio/publisher responsible, and singling out individuals who worked on the game to harass. This happens a lot with voice actors being targeted because people don’t like their performance, despite them just doing what the voice director told them to do.
There’s also a difference between saying “I don’t like ____” or “this game sucks” versus “I’m glad you got laid off, serves you right” or straight-up death threats. Just like the VAs, the development staff were working at the direction of the lead/director, who were possibly working at the direction of the publisher, so directing vitriol towards individuals is likely not productive, on top of being cruel. You are certainly allowed to make your opinion heard, but don’t be an asshole about it.
I’ve purchased many games at $40 or less over the past year that have given me hundred of hours of joy and entertainment.
If I spend almost twice that price on a game, and it’s unfinished, buggy, and heavily monetized; you can bet your ass I’m going to be upset.
It’s not about the cost of development. It’s about quality of the experience. For indie devs, the game has to be good to do well. For a lot of AAA studios, the game is merely a product that only has to be as entertaining as it needs to be for them to make enough profit.
And 40 years ago the federal minimum wage was $3.35, which adjusts to $9.89 today. Inflation for businesses isn’t an excuse when the inflation for consumers isn’t keeping up.
Back when you also got a physical product with an instruction manual and possibly a poster or something else. Now we get a digital license that can be revoked and six months to a year of patching for it to be in a stable state. Yay!
if we accept 70€ then they increase the price to 80€. when we accept that they increase it to 90€ and so on. Though i guess this becomes kind of moot point when high price on game has started to correlate with lower quality on every aspect except graphics.
The cost of developing games hasn’t skyrocketed. Developers have more means than ever. Many things that was handcrafted on crappy slow computers then are auto-generated in seconds now.
There’s no massive shipping costs or printing of physical mediums anymore. And no losses if the already printed cassettes or CD’s didn’t sell.
If a game costs hundreds of millions to develop, in this day and age, it’s by design and/or because of bloated companies.
In both Left for Dead games, somebody had to either play a black person or a woman. Hell, in L4D2 two people had to play a black character, and one was, gasp, a woman.
Got 2,000 hours in both games. Never heard a complaint or even a jokey racist comment. None.
No one whined and the games were a smash success, people still playing.
Yeah, I’m… skeptical, to say the least. I don’t think any of these sprawling, massively-scoped “everything games” have ever actually lived up to the hype. It’s a problem of pure logistics. Making a game with so many different segments each with entirely unique gameplay loops is essentially like developing more than half a dozen games at once. It’s the problem Spore had - the scope was just too broad, and even with EA and Will Wright behind it, it eventually released as a pretty decent creature creator stapled to four shallow, rushed game stages.
No studio has the resources or inclination to commit to the 10-15+ year development cycle for a single game needed to fit that much scope, and even if they did, the entire game design landscape would have changed between the beginning and the end of the project, which would make major technical and design components of the game obsolete before it was even finished.
I’d put money on this game either becoming vaporware or releasing as a chaotic, disjointed mess with the depth of a puddle. I’d love to see them prove me wrong, but I just don’t see how anyone could overcome those kinds of logistical hurdles.
I think keeping it in an isometric perspective helps to simplify things a lot. The mechanics wouldn’t have to be as immersive and it should allow for more freedom for things to change depending on the player’s preferences. I’m still skeptical but at least it seems they’re going in a reasonable direction.
Wrath of the Righteous does it pretty good. The only sub game in the game that kinda sucks is the strategy game for the giant wars toward the end, and it’s more due to the fact that it’s not super robust; it’s just the bare minimum needed for that style of play.
Really that’s the most common flaw I see with “everything games;” they spend too much time putting everything in, but it’s never as fleshed out as it would have been if they focused entirely on one aspect.
I wish news articles would just inform without strong opinions. It’s clear this guy hates this game and doesn’t want play the update. It’s not a review…
Fantastic, I’m sure it was a hell of a slog for them. I’m really looking forward to their next games, their one offs like Bloodborne and Sekiro are my favourites.
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