This is not surprising, but it’s nevertheless interesting, because it seems to disprove a naïve assumption that I’ve seen repeated over the years: that Tencent doesn’t influence the game companies it invests in.
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.
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.
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
I’ll just wait for the Witcher 4 patch 2.0, which will release after 3 years from the original release date and will actually contain the advertised game.
Ditto. Was surprised to hear it that far along, with absolutely no prior leaks/hype, except maybe they learned from CP2077.
Eventually sorted out they mean ‘production’ in the movie sense, not the product sense. And I suppose that’s fair, given how much modern ARPGs incorporate voice & physical acting, foley work, motion capture, etc
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