Shawn Layden, the titular “Ex-Playstation boss”, is currently strategic advisor for Tencent. Would we say that Tencent is currently adhering to this strategic advice?
the hard part is that they are partial investors in so many things. I believe they own the PUBG studio, which is the same studio that published Callisto Protocol, and that game had one of the largest budgets of all time. That’s the most obvious link I could find, but also that game came out a couple years ago so who knows, maybe they are steering the ship away from big budgets as we speak.
Most games that are long are artificially so, with padded out content and grinding to advance. Short excellent games sell well. Huge expensive messes don’t.
Just like movies, large blockbuster, high budget content can sell well but does risk sacrificing its soul and purpose. Occasionally one is both excellent technically, artistically and fun too.
Or you can have smaller games with a more specific purpose which won’t sell as well. Some low budget games are bad. Some high budget games are bad. Neither is a mark of quality, they are just different ways of making games with different outcomes and purposes.
Games need to turn a profit to be visible, so they should be looking at what’s the optimum way to spend their budget and make sales.
As gamers, we should be rewarding good games, and avoiding microtransactions and all the upsells. I don’t buy any cosmetics or additional content (unless it’s a continuation of the game that makes sense as another chapter). I want to avoid that side of gaming as it doesn’t lead to good games. I pay full price at launch for my favourite game series, but not extra content. Other games I purchase later on sale.
Length has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the bullshit inflated budgets. They’re comes a point of diminishing returns with how many staff at working on a game, and how much is spent on marketing.
Does he think books should be shorter because the years of authors’ lives spent composing them are also not sustainable?
I wonder if he’s aware that development budgets can be allocated in different ways, like paying good writers to make substantial (and long) stories, or refining the user interface and game mechanics so that they’re fun to play for a long time, rather than pushing every new hardware generation to its technical limits.
Honestly if shadow of the erdtree didn’t come out it would be considered the gold standard dlc.
Edit: and you get to skip straight to the dlc on character creation. It makes some story decisions for you but if you want meat and not potatoes then that option is available.
Yes but also no. Played base game recently, and i had a lot of bugs and frustrations. Some of them because i ran it from hdd, which is not their recommended way of media to install on, but some were clearly design failures and bugs…
I just finished four endings and am now grinding side missions. Through oner 90h of great gameplay, I had like 5 bugs (1 crash, 1 person walking on air, 1 body that rolled away like a car, 1 car stuck spinning wheels on a flat surface, 15 cases of “summoning” a car to see it dropping upside down 30 meters away)
I’ve seen worse in terms of bugs, and it’s an interesting game with tons of content and different ways to build your character.
Yeah, yeah, we know they fixed the bugs but did they fix the game? Do cops still exclusively spawn behind you so you can escape them by driving in a straight line?
Interesting. I just looked it up and it seems they completely revamped the entire police system. It light finally be time for me to give it another shot.
It’s a good game now. I waited over 2 years to buy it and think it’s the best single player shooter I’ve played since Bioshock/HL2. Have completed it 5 times now using different builds and am thinking about getting the expansion if it goes on sale at xmas.
I bought it on release because TW3 and Deus Ex are some of my favorite games but it was so bad back then that I haven’t touched it since. Alright, I’ll give it another shot.
I don’t think you’ll regret it. The story is incredibly rich and outcomes depend a lot on your choices and playstyles. It never feels like you’re grinding for levels to me. There’s the occasional bug, but no more than other games I’ve played. I think it’s probably the first genre defining game we’ve seen in about a 15 years.
Can confirm. I’m playing through my 4th total playthrough (once on launch, once about 6mo later, one on the DLC launch and one now) and the last two have been noticeable in terms of quality improvements. I’m playing modded to shit, but only have had a few crashes. Police feel fine now, I’m not using anything that alters their spawn logic. Just about the only thing I’ve not enjoyed still is driving, even modded to hell lmao
Others answered but it’s easier/cheaper for them to use a vendor’s engine. It makes sense.
What sucks is that UE seems to almost have a monopoly on engine leasing. I wish there were more options. Having all games use the same engine is putting too many eggs in the same basket.
They claimed that it was expensive and was part of the reason for cyberpunk’s turbulent launch.
It’s a real shame though, most UE5 runs awful it seems, and are still limited by single thread performance, unlike RED Engine which scales far better with more CPU cores.
Tbh RED engine also has its plethora of problems, missing features, and makes it harder to onboard new team members (need to train on new engine instead of basically every single dev having experience with unity or unreal).
Aside from doing the work to maintain and update your own engine, there is also the problem of onboarding new hires. If you use a standard you can go out and hire people already experienced with working on the engine. If you use your own, you have to teach a new hire to use it before they can be any help.
I read that this caused a lot of development woes on Halo Infinite for example.
So far, it’s a pretty looking game. The trouble is finding things to do in it.
That was the end of the quest. All setup, no punchline.
There was no one to thank me. All I had was a little more loot. Where’s my impact on the world?
If these quotes ring true in the final game, that’s a hard pass. I want RPGs, action-oriented or not, to allow me to play a role. A million games can make fantasy look pretty, Obsidian needs to make it interesting.
that’s what i’m saying! I hope the quests are more dense with writing in the final release. Well-designed quests with clever writing are the entire appeal of an Obsidian RPG!
After playing part of their game Outer Worlds, I’m not surprised. I thought the writing was alright, but the game felt lacking and empty. I was surprised because I’ve only ever heard good things about New Vegas. I haven’t played New Vegas yet but I’m assuming it’s a much better time
You’d be right in my opinion. New Vegas is incredible. But something felt missing from the outer worlds, and I was hoping they would find it in avowed.
I should probably get around to continuing Witcher 3. I just have a mental issue with quests and choices blocking other quests that I just end up reading the wiki. Help me.
I sure hope so, I got quite burned on the last big budget game I’ve played years after the hype. God of War 2018 felt like a culmination of every wrong with gaming at that time (outside of mtx) and AAA games only got worse from there.
Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?
I hate those because:
Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.
Do you mean quick time events (QTEs)? The game has at least one cutscene I remember where you’re prompted to activate an ability to change the outcome, however, I think that’s it. The games usually doesn’t have them.
Although, it does commit an entirely different sin in terms of unskippable cutscenes: There are several ‘immersive’ cutscenes with you suddenly walking at a snail’s pace or climbing slowly around while the cutscene plays out.
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