“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”
And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.
I’d argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. “Don’t buy this”, “Pirate this”, “XPublisher is damn evil”. Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what’s good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we’ll give them $60 but…not much more than that. We’ll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that’s curious about entertainment doesn’t care much about 30 “Don’t” rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they’re bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.
It’s reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I’d even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that’s another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.
And I’ll even go one further: If a common thread is “Studios ask too much of our money for the full game”…we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.
I think the takeaway here is that these things are not important to gamers. a few of us complain about it online, but clearly we are outnumbered in the market.
BG3 received a lot of possitivity for releasing a massive game for half the price of starfield. But it seems apparent that negative reactions are stronger than possitive ones for most of us.
BG3 has been 70 dollars since release, unless i missed a sale. meanwhile starfield was on game pass on release which is like 20 bucks a month, so if you play starfield for 1 month then cancel you had essentially paid just 20 dollars for it. im on xbox though, not steam, so that may be why ours are so different
If people had just chilled the fuck out… we might be in a better place now.
Gamers aren’t a bloc, and each person has their own individual game tastes, opinions, and willingness to spend money on trivial junk.
Most gamers are tween Fortnight players or ones who play exclusively mobile games full of ads. They are not people like us. This was inevitable, and nothing would have or will ever change it. Most people just want a pleasant distraction from the horrors of life and don’t have any particular principles when it comes to how they spend their money on games.
I will admit to being one of the people who bought this DLC when it came out. I was very engrossed in the game at that time and felt like $2.50 was trivial enough that I just went for it.
Now, I was uninformed about what the armor did and was disappointed that it was only cosmetic. But I don’t remember regretting buying it.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t bought it. And it’s something I wouldn’t buy now.
As a massive fan of Age of Empires since the first one, I still cannot believe they re-released them as “Definitive” editions, and then have proceeded to add new DLC to them.
I love the support and attention they’re getting, and the new content they never had before. But I cannot get over adding paid DLC’s to a DEFINITIVE EDITION OF SOMETHING!!!
Normally I would take this as a joke but they shut off concord after 10 days and that was worth 200mil. I’m surprised they didn’t give it 2 weeks at least.
The first time I heard about concord was when they shut it off. I don’t know how they expect a game to do well when they did absolutely zero advertising.
That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.
Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?
Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel.
To me this feels like perfectly within the scope of what should be the realm of “remaster”, it’s just that history teaches us to expect less.
Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.
The templated auto face animations during dialogue along with the low enthusiasm VO from half of the cast is really the only factor that keeps OG horizon from being perfect.
I was working in the industry at the time and people absolutely talked about the implications of microtransactions and how it would result in more expensive games and being nickel and dimed.
Like, I distinctly remember conversations with actual human beings from exactly the horse armor DLC and maybe we didn’t think it was going to result in, say the online shooter battle pass formula exactly, but we without ambiguity understood that meaningful in game items, and things like levels / experience would be monetized.
The biggest shocks to me were how patches would be used to reduce the game testing cycles, enabling companies to print incomplete or broken versions of games, requiring day one patches.
It’s a disgusting practice now, and it was then too.
pretty sure that’s illegal and they can sue for the maternity leave pay as well as discrimination….
lots of corps(e) don’t want to employ mothers of young children, as there’s lots of legally excused absences and they can’t press them for as much overtime….
Only illegal if the maternity leave was the reason, and it can be shown to be the reason. Over 200 people were also laid off at the same time. I have no doubt bungie added them because of the maternity leave, but it’s gonna be really hard to show in a court of law.
Why are we getting remasters for games that already look great on PS5? There are plenty of games that could actually use the touch up, and don’t run natively on current-gen at all.
It feels like Sony is sitting on a goddamn gold mine.
I’m confused, isn’t this already available on PC and PS5? Why does it need to be remastered? I thought remastering a game meant making it work on a new platform.
A “remaster” is traditionally more focused on a rerelease with improved graphic fidelity - details, resolution, possibly lower-effort improvements to models and geometry, but basically the same game, slightly modernised with better modern compatibility.
A “remake” would be a complete overhaul of the modelling, QoL improvements, or reimagining some systems potentially including game engine. Eg, the FF7 remake.
I wish Valve had some sort of monetary incentive to fix this. If this happened to the cash cow that is Counter Strike this would have been fixed already. It’s sad to see this going on especially with the resurgence TF2 has been having lately.
And yet they really don’t do anything about it, I have yet to see evidence that they engage in the cat and mouse game. A lot of cheaters have full inventories of skins and have been cheating for many years at this point with the same cheats
If you don’t think Valve is banning anyone from their games then I invite you to take a trip to the VAC steam forums and see all the posts from people proclaiming their innocence and complaining about their ban. Always a good time.
I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.
Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.
Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.
If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.
People are being harassed and doxed by a group of people that have turned one of their most popular games into a fucking cesspool. They need to either throw in the towel and drop support for TF2 or wage war on these losers.
Hire a dedicated team, involve the police, I don’t fucking know. The current state of TF2 is an absolute disgrace, it’s fucking pathetic.
Up until they release the intellectual property into the public domain, alongside the source code and hosting tools.
Corporations are not to be trusted to maintain and preserve our culture. They have enthusiasticly proven again and again they are irresponsible and cannot handle this task.
That's precisely the problem; they continue to support the game, in the state that it's in. Honestly, an appropriate move would be for them to officially discontinue support for the game altogether (even if that means not having a new IP to replace it with). This means turning off their official servers, and removing the ability to buy/sell inventory items on the Steam Marketplace.
Right now, Valve allows people to sell items for real money (which they take a cut from) in a game that is overrun by bots. They need to either fix the bot problem, or stop taking people's money.
The fact that they’re letting this shit happen to one of their own communities is extremely disappointing. They should take it personally that some a group of people are using their game as a tool to harass people, but they don’t give a fuck.
I have lost so much respect for Valve over their handling of TF2. I’ve gone from a fanboy to a hater.
That’s not to say they didn’t expect backlash, they fully expected some, they simply didn’t do a field study to see how bad it was going to be. Actually pretty common in the industry. Thow shit against the wall, see how bad the outcome is, discount that against profit. :)
“One of the things about Horse Armour that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions,” Nesmith told us. “Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn’t know!”
Its not the graphics that need a rework, its their quest syatem.
The side quests were tied to your overall level, meaning if you were overleveled, you could unlock quests to battles that were only explained way later in the main quest line. Also the Frozen Wilds expansion made more sense if you did them BEFORE the final quarter of the main story line, but the missions themselves were of a higher level than the endgame boss.
Regarding the main quest line, while its quality is noticibly much higher in Zero Dawn than the later game Forbidden West, the way they were structured meant that f you unlocked the extra dialogue (from talking to certain NPCs) out of order, the whole script felt a little jarring.
Tldr: the quest system of Zero Fawn needs a fuckton of polish, not the graphics
Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.
I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.
Also, the one incharge of side quests needs a bloody promotion. The side quests quality in Forbidden West was overall as good as the MAIN quest quality in Zero Dawn.
The quest themselves (minus a few misses), the voice acting and mocap, the POLISH. swoon
I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.
If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.
Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.
The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.
Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”
Hard agree on the weqpon upgrades. Getting the perfect one, upgrading it to the nines and FEEL like it was worth it was one of the fun parts in HZD. Not so much here (Wildmaws shudders)
Regarding Strike, if they had slowed down the pace of the game, like death of the world in a few years instead of months (with hard timeskips you could gree to), and set the Strike tables in out-of-the-way corners you never have to go to without good reason, I MIGHT have felt like playing it. Deff interesting, just not part of the overall tone of the game.
With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.
Bungie’s layoffs have been devastating. 220 jobs were eliminated yesterday, while other jobs had been shifted over to PlayStation Studios.
Sadly it’s all but impossible to show their layoff was because of maternity leave and not just because they were ‘part of the layoff’…
Hope there’s a paper trail adding them to the list of layoffs because of the maternity leave, but I doubt they’d be stupid enough to put it down on paper.
Could be a chat or email trail. People nowadays often forget the difference between talking something over at the urinal, and writing about it in an app.
My work is in the process of hiring someone to replace me since I’m headed to a new job. After a recent interview, a co-worker on the hiring committee made a comment on Teams, “His age seems OK.”
Uhhh, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about age in hiring decisions. Especially on a written medium. Pretty sure that in the US, age discrimination laws starts at like 40yo, including hiring and firing. That interviewee seemed to be over 40yo, which is probably what prompted that comment.
Not that I think the candidate will sue us if we don’t hire him, but it’s just unnecessary risk. And I don’t even work in HR or legal; rather I’m in IT. Surprised HR didn’t say anything about that comment.
That whole mindset is weird to me. I’m in my mid 40s and just got hired on as a team lead for a bunch of kids who are fresh out of college. They’re exactly where I am when I started and I’m excited to share my 20 years of experience and mentor them.
They wanted to hire me on as their supervisor but I made it clear that the extra couple grand a year for that headache didn’t interest me.
It is. Additionally, my co-worker who made the comment is like 33-34. I’m 37. Another person on the committee is 40. HR is like 64. So it’s not like we’re a bunch of young guns ourselves lol. We should want experience, and with experience tends to come age.
But yeah, I getcha on the management thing. I’m technically a manager, but I don’t have any subordinates. Because I told them, they’re going to have pay me way more to become an actual manager with direct reports, especially since I’d lose my non-exempt status. To make me exempt, they’d need to make it worth my while. We’re a non-profit, so we already get paid crap (though benefits are excellent).
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