Glad to see this project finally release. Played it on and off while it was in beta and it is definitely one of the best ways to experience Daggerfall, especially with the modding community that has sprung around the Unity version.
This game was originally going to release two years ago without Microsoft making sure it got more QA than Bethesda is known for. Microsoft or not, the game design and feature completeness likely wouldn't have moved an inch.
Hi-Fi Rush, for a counter example, was one of the best games of the year.
I would disagree with your 50 hour Starfield assessment, only on the basis of Todd Howards own comment that the game was made to be played for a long time.
50 hours for a game meant to be played for a long time just isn't very long at all. Heck, I enjoyed my time in Starfield and I had more than 50 hours. However I could not continue with NG+, it was just godawful.
For a game meant to be played extensively it failed in most regards.
Despite Bethesda being kinda weird and shitty, I remain excited about the game myself. It still blows me away they decided to release without modding tools. But I’m looking forward to that quite a bit
To be honest, I really enjoyed my run (100 hours in). If you omit the bugs, it’s a nice alternative to Skyrim with a very different setting (space) and some quality of life improvements (eg: having your ship to store shit anywhere you go, instead of traveling back and forth to your house if you have any).
But I admit the game feels very old in general (especially because of those loading screens, which should be a thing from the past in 2023), and is not original at all on its FPS mechanics. There is also this odd feeling that the game does not want to block you access to anything (while the new game plus, which is a very good idea and introduced in a clever way, should have been enough to be more « punishing » with the player).
As an « old » gamer, it was not a big issue (especially because I play ton of retrogaming games, along with recent releases), but I totally understand what a player expecting a modern SF RPG game might feel.
I enjoyed the first playthrough too but I just got so tired of everything the second go around. Not much had changed so I was just redoing quests I’d done but now I “knew” things and made it go by faster. Yay?
It’s so dull, I did everything the first time around so now I just get to watch it again, but it’s “fun” cause there’s one changed dialogue option? Meh. The game has an incredible philosophy, a terrible philosophy for its relationship to the gameplay.
In regards to gameplay, it was fine. I liked the flying, ship building was fun, gunplay felt okay. Walking around areas is mostly pretty. But like everyone else my issue was all the menu diving, and I found a few ways to mitigate how often I used it but man was it frustrating to have to menu dive so much, sometimes in situations where it doesn’t even make sense, like arriving and landing on a planet.
And then again, to lose everything about your character that makes the game interesting (built ship, weapons, etc) during NG+ is just disheartening. I understand why, that doesn’t make it easier lol.
Yeah, I didn’t bother with a second playthrough because of this. It’s strange because the idea is great, so why not encourage the player to do a second playthrough by not allowing him/her to see everything on a single run ?
The main thing I'm confused about is why they didn't include some of what they'd worked on for Payday 2. Like, it has a genuinely decent VR but it's just not present (I guess they've "hinted" at it).
In the US, extreme violence has always been a lot more accepted than nudity. Which really says a lot about what kind of values the society has when completely natural human biology is shunned and anti-social destructive behavior isn’t.
That's true, but blasphemous content created a lot more controversy than sheer violence. I remember when D&D books were getting burned because parents thought it was satanist.
Cult of the Lamb is explicitly demonic and yet it's still the possible addition of sex that is creating all this hubbub. Personally I think it's going to be about as explicit as The Sims at most, getting in a sleeping bag and them some shaking and effects.
Cult of the Lamb was and still is massively controversial among evangelicals and other extremely religious/Christian people since it's so blasphemous. The falling number of Christians in the US combined with the echo chamber effect on the Internet just (ironically) means all the religious rage doesn't leak out and permeate all of society like it used to.
Patch 5 also includes improved inventory access, allowing you to manage the inventory of all companions from one single UI, regardless of whether they’re currently in the active party.
I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough.
Glad to see Starfield reach another Bethesda game milestone: outsourcing your bug-fixing to modders. More seriously, I'm excited to see what modders end up being able to do with Starfield once they get used to making mods for it.
"the minor bugs and issues that Bethesda hasn’t quite gotten to yet". I don't know any of those, I only know the ones they will willfully ignore for eternity 🙄
Good job, community patch people, saviours of Bethesda games.
Aren’t layoffs the norm for the games industry? You hire a bunch of people to make your new AAA title. A few years later, the game is out and the bugs are fixed, and now you don’t need all these employees anymore. Rinse and repeat when you’re ready to make the next AAA title.
Not defending the practice, but developers shouldn’t be surprised when they’re laid off after the company deems that they’re no longer needed.
Unions don’t stop lay-offs, but this is still a strong move and probably the most likely to succeed. CDPR needs to find new income now that they don’t have a game on the horizon, so they need devs to produce.
Literally, the power is in the devs’ hands here. CDPR’s only option is to either work with the union or lay them all off and then not release any new products and go bankrupt.
Hopefully, it spreads to more European countries and becomes normal business for games to be made with unions in Europe
keep in mind, CDPR isn’t just a game studio, they own GOG, so not releasing a game doesn’t necessarily get then at 0 income. Although not as big as valve of course, thats like saying valve would be broke if it didn’t release games (and it rarely releases games nowadays)
eh no. it’s not like saying that at all, as you point out yourself, they are very different in terms of scale.
However we do have actual data here, because CDPR is publicly traded and produces financial reports. according to their Q1 financial report, gog had a net profit of around 56k euros. this is after it’s big comeback from being “unprofitable” in 2021, where they basically moved everyone out of gog and onto other projects or laid them off.
So we are talking about a situation where CDPR would have to lay off everyone aside from the few gog employees that are left, and exist as a shell company that just pays the hosting bills.
this is not “like saying valve would be broke if it didn’t release games” as valves primary source of income, is not making and selling games, it’s getting 30% of 99% of game sales on the pc platform via steam.
Their games often don’t work as well in multiplayer, at least not with steam users where the majority of my friends have their games. Along with this, it’s a pain getting steam workshop mods working
Their bundles kinda suck without sites like Fanatical or Humble offering gog codes
That said, I do buy from them when it’s an older game like heroes of might and magic (goes back to the site’s roots as Good Old Games I guess). Or when it’s a single player experience without a lot of mod support, like Jrpgs
GOG is barely profitable, though, and that was back when CDPR was the golden child of the games industry. I don’t think it counts as much of a revenue stream for the company.
One issue is that unions have failed to globalize while industries have. CDPR could simply chose to bypass the union by opening a dev studio in a country with no or less union presence.
Given the recent wave of layoffs in the game industry, they’ll have no shortage finding capable people.
i don’t buy into this defeatist attitude at all I’m sorry.
to do that without working with the unions in good faith, they would have to lay everyone off then meander for a few years rebuilding somewhere else. it’s not a quick process. and then probably release something of even lower quality than their recent releases.
the only way to do what you are saying is to work with the unions for the current projects and work to build non union studios for future projects. which unions would probably fight.
It is worth understanding that, at least historically, CDP is a lot closer to “Polish Electronic Arts” than a dev studio. Not sure how that has shifted over the past decade or so and the new approach to localization and distribution.
I doubt they are going to shut the doors and move. But it is a possibility. Just cite that the CP expansion hasn’t sold well enough and they were still recovering from the initial bomb of CP and that they were counting on that Witcher 1 remake and it is a hard time financially and they would be operating at a much smaller capacity while they reorg. Do layoffs that are legally legit, and then reopen elsewhere citing concerns over geopolitics.
But yeah. My money is more on satellite studios that eventually become the primary. Takes a few years longer but drastically reduces union power and gives a warning to the industry as a whole. And is generally the solution in these situations.
I’m not trying to be defeatist. I’m just advocating for unions to stop focusing on the local aspect. Transnational cooperation is what is needed in unions today.
Something which larger unions, such as the steel and car industry unions in Europe have been trying (and mostly failing) to do for almost two decades.
Companies, by and large, have used the globalized economy to sidestep local action for almost 30 years now.
Ignoring this is simply a recepy for repeating the mistakes of the past. Especially in software, where there is no physical production equipment at all, and in games, where talent and labour is plentiful.
Unless you have an organization that reaches as far as the companies you’re trying to bring to the table, you will simply be outmanœuvred.
You also overestimate the level of union participation if you think they would need to lay off everyone to break a union strike.
Feel free to tell me I’m wrong, but I’ve been through the proces twice, both involving union action, both in the software industry. Once as part of the workers delegation to the negotiating table. Dismiss a company’s ruthlessness or resourcefulness at your own peril.
Local unions can only hope to hold off the axe until current projects where the required know how can not be rebuilt or transfered in time are done.
Devs are not as easy to replace as factory workers, EU and US/CA software talent is top tier. I’d imagine even factory workers aren’t so easy to replace these days.
vg247.com
Aktywne