For what? They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore. Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian. Bethesda as a whole is not trusted for big RPGs after Starfield. Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. Id has been doing okay, but has had a lot of brain drain, and they definitely don’t produce the “live service hits” MS appears to be looking for - just things people would love to see on Game Pass and discard. There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
…We about to see Crash vs Spyro Autobattle Royale?
That’s the thing though. Gamers have a special kind of amnesia that gets triggered every time BIG_IP_OF_THEIR_LIKING releases a new sequel or edition. The communities on Lemmy and reddit are unfortunately not indicative of how the wider audience actually perceives games. We’re a fringe group, and the publishers/studios bank hard on that. The uneducated and apathetic masses are their target audience. If the gaming world listened to the likes of Lemmy and reddit users, micro/macrotransactions, early-access hell, and half-finished releases wouldn’t have become common practice. But here we are.
Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian.
You may be right. Fallout 76 has however seen a record number of players since the show aired. That’s commonplace with most gaming franchises when a film or TV series comes out. See also: The Last of Us, and SWTOR when The Mandalorian came out.
(I personally think of Neverwinter Nights 2 when thinking of Obsidian. t’was peak gaming)
Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.
I agree with you here. In reality, Blizzard still consistently has queue issues when releasing a new WoW expansion or game, even after all this time. They know it happens, and won’t scale up for launch day on WoW retail AND Classic. Their target audience eats that shit up and I’m saying this as a former player that quit during Battle for Azeroth. No comment on Starcraft as I quit when the OG Starcraft scene died down on aus-1 back in the day. Overwatch 1 was seeing incredible numbers when I played from launch until Moria was released. OW2 being a pay-to-win shit show ate into their numbers until they gave up the pay-to-win bullshit. I see more and more of my friends and streamers playing it again now that Bobby Kotick is gone. I’m quite disappointed in some of them, but it is what it is.
There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
Good thing they’re just rumours until the earnings report comes. Sony has poorly-redacted court documents stating that CoD is their bread and butter on the playstation. There’s no way that’s changing in the forseeable future (at least not in the billions of dollars range), even with the absolute shit-show that was MW3. When MW4 comes out, the diehard fans will forget it even happened, as they have with every single release since its inception.
The one surprising bit about this is the lack of E33. I know it’s not Jason’s fault but it irks me that every game news outlet repeatedly highlights the same dozen games or so. I’m following four of them and 80% of coverage and reviews is for the same games over and over again. Only digitalfoundry strays off on occasion, and that’s because they aim towards a more technical discussion. There were literally 19000 games released on steam alone last year, and everyone seems to only cover E33, BG3, Blue Prince, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, Avowed, CoD etc. I have to subscribe to obscure subs or youtube channels just to get coverage of the occasional forgotten indie.
That all makes sense though. By definition, popular games are liked by many people. Popular games are talked about more. People expect popular games to be listed. Many people will doubt these publications if they fail to list several of the most popular games.
I’m sure there is some money changing hands too, but that can only do so much (maybe move a game a little higher on these lists).
Popular and good (for you) are not the same thing. Games can either, both, or neither of those things. It is only when we think about large numbers of people that popular and “good” become correlated.
I agree but these are usually supposed to be the first line when games/news hit the web, and sometimes it appears that the only decent journalist left is Schreier, with everyone else seemingly following him and his direction. Paid coverage definitely accounts for some of the overlap, but like you said it’s probably just reviewers aiming for a greater audience.
There’s always steam curated lists for the rest, I suppose.
I literally finished E33 a couple of hours ago, and while I do think it’s a quality game, I just couldn’t really connect with it on any emotional level. I do like the combat system. It’s fun. But the story just didn’t really grab me. I have friends saying they cried at certain scenes, and I’m just like, “Really?”
Meanwhile I got some fat tears flowing during Death Stranding 2. But everyone is different.
Plus, while E33 has really good art direction, on the PS5 every environment seemed to have this haze going on. And there were lots of weird graphical flashes of artifacts or lighting. The game looks good and also doesn’t in a way. It’s hard to describe.
Rollerdrome was very solid concept but the difficulty curve was pretty intense. One second you feel like you have the hang of it the next you can’t get to the next arena.
Yeah I absolutely adored the concept and would love.to see it picked up. I discovered it after pitching to a friend Tony Hawk’s Borderlands 4 and gradually realising the proof of concept existed.
Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I'd make that trade.
Man, these guys really can't catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.
Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn't sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what's realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.
Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn't played it personally.
Well, then you're my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it's a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they're both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).
And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.
Nah, I'm mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized "hidden gem" lists of game collectors in thirty years, it's that.
Some day my Marvel fatigue will have worn off, and I'll be in the mood for it. If it's still for sale, I'll buy it. If not, maybe I'll pirate it. I'm glad they made a good game; it just wasn't a game I was looking for when it came out, and I don't think I'm alone. If you want to see this cycle happen again in real time, keep an eye on Suicide Squad over the next few weeks.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I'd be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies' look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so... make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Oh, sorry, I meant the Avengers cycle, since that article I linked was about a combined loss between the two games, but really...Avengers was the more expensive game and did the brand damage. Suicide Squad will be that again, even though WB had several years to see this coming.
Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn't.
There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.
I might recommend going and taking a look at Andor. It is IN Star Wars, but it is not Star Wars. It felt like Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, but better pacing.
I’ve been 10 years in the industry and honestly. This feels familiar. I feel like there was mass layoffs about 4+ years ago. There was also the Boston Games collapse around 2013. I’ve been told this industry has a very direct pattern. Expand, contract, expand, contract. What you want to do is to get into it when it’s expanding and hope by the time it contracts you have enough experience to be vital to a project.
And before that in the big 2008 crisis, sure. And, to put forth a silver lining, layoffs tends to get a lot of press and happen all at once, while people start new projects and get new jobs all the time without making headlines.
It still sucks to see social media erupt in lost job notifications every so often, though.
I think this time bothers me more because... well, there isn't much reason for it. Mostly everything blew up during the pandemic, a lot of money was made and now things are going back to baseline. But public companies will NEVER report they're shrinking if they can help it, and if they do they will try to appear to be becoming cheaper to compensate, so the obvious call is to let go of a bunch of people you were mostly hoarding anwyay.
The takeaway here, if you ask me, is to never have loyatly for an employer, at least when it comes to moving on to a different job or ask for better conditions. This sort of thing happens all the time and especially publicly traded companies will not hesitate to cut you loose if it makes business sense. You have less leverage, so the thing to do is a) bargain collectively to get more of that leverage, and b) treat your labour negotiations with the company with the same business sense they do.
In the meantime, I still recommend hugging a developer. Patting lightly the back of the head could also be acceptable. Just ask for a preference first.
Loyalty to a company is silly. A lot of people in games learn that quickly in their career because they want to go work for some huge name-brand company that they grew up with just for them to either harshly reject or if they actually get the job, they end up in a crunch cycle trying to prove themselves.
That said people do have loyalty, to other people and to projects. People are passionate about working with people they like and on projects they care about. You only get to make like 20-30 games in your career. Even then that includes all the games that didn’t release. It only really allows for 2-3 years per game whereas lots of games are 5+ years. Projects and people matter a lot and it’s important to not just chase money. Otherwise, you end up working at Google Stadia or Amazon.
Well, yeah, but that bit comes in between the buisness bits. Most managers do care about the people working there, too, but ultimately that will not drive the decisionmaking when it comes to the business, paritcularly in public companies with an obligation to shareholders. It's only fair to reciprocate.
So absolutely be loyal to your team and your project, but never at the expense of your working conditions or compensation.
That's one of the reasons why collective bargaining is important. Short of having representation, like they do on the film business, you want to compartimentalize somehow, and having a designated representative to negottiate with everybody else behind them is a way to get there.
I’d say it’s suspiciously-timed. My guess is Unity were tired of the shit PR, then tried to flip things around and use this to cast themselves as the victim. So I’m taking this one with about a planet’s worth of salt.
Given current events, it seems very plausible to me they got at least one - but let’s not pretend it means the backlash is all wrong and we should start giving up all indie revenue to the great lord engine provider.
Obsidian as a studio is super underrated. Both pillars of eternity has amazing worldbuilding and narrative. They aren’t unknown or anything, but gotdang they are some of the most creative devs out there!
They’re also one of the few studios out there that can manage California salaries, remain a multi-project studio, and not scale up so fast that they’re trying to build games they can’t afford to make.
Are they really underrated? Not throwing any shade, but every time I see them mentioned it’s because people are praising the hell out of them. I also agree that there’s very few games they’ve had their hands on that has been less than stellar, so I have a hard time saying they’re actually underrated. They’ve been pretty steadily a mark of excellence.
People see Avowed and wish it was Elder Scrolls, or they see Outer Worlds 2 and wish it was bigger or something. I’m not really sure why these people come away with the criticisms they do, but in my opinion, Obsidian made two of the best games this year, and those games were rated in the low 80s on average on Open Critic.
Yup, you’re entirely correct, Obsidian is often and loudly praised, they deserve it. But also…
… they deserve a lil more… always a lil’ more!
(I’m just being silly and dum. I have just recently started their games and just wanted to sing their praises myself. Don’t mind me, just a lil fan girling out about great world building. 🥹)
Lol fair. Trust me, I know enough about being a fanboy myself for games I felt deserved better ratings. Again, no problem with them at all, I’ve loved a handful of their games, like Grounded. Haven’t played 2 yet, but my previous friend group had some fallout last year so I’ll have to see who I’m playing that with.
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
Starfield
Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release. And after.
Now let’s look at some others:
KCD2: CryEngine
Expedition 33: Unreal
Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
Stray: Unreal
As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
So what I hope this means is Larian moving to CryEngine or something like that, and not making something from scratch. But if they’re talking about early access so soon, I bet they licensed another engine.
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the hardware support/optimization and contemporary architecture stuff for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like CryEngine KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
If they can shoehorn in something akin to KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their dev workflows and existing systems in place, that’d be perfect.
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around devs and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great and all, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows. It is so obviously a top priority.
Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models. Cogs in their pipeline, so to speak, which has nothing to do with GenAI slop making it into a final product.
The line is very fine though, and most in the business world skew to the side of pushing slop.
I think very little about AI compared to most people, for or against, but it largely seems to me like a solution in search of a problem, and it’s very cult-like how many CEOs get on board with it so quickly despite its very public lack of actually good results. On paper, the way Vincke describes their use of it sounds fine to me, but hopefully he’s not doing something so idiotic as to mandate its usage, as is happening at workplaces for friends of mine right now.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something reasonable, yet get immense, unwarranted backlash (both internally and publically) because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML. And how politicized “AI” is becoming.
Machine learning is not bad. Tech Bro evangelism and the virus they spread among executives, is. And I don’t want the garbage they sell to poison tools studios like Larian could use to get ahead of AAA publishers.
Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works? I don’t see that in the linked article.
Nothing has been announced as far as Baldur’s Gate 4 goes yet. It looks like Hasbro is being a little bit smart and are going to try and make (“make”) a handful of other smaller games, like the recent Warlock game announcement.
But at some point Baldur’s Gate 4 will be announced, but Hasbro isn’t going to be willing to invest properly into it in order to make a good game.
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
Larian’s track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3. They also made their own game engine for their older Divinity titles (Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity). And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of “off the shelf” engines.
The problem they describe will self-correct; the “market” will drive that. But it might not be pretty. The things below are already happening, but will be further instigated:
New AAA non-franchise titles will be less common because return is less likely amongst the sea of new games coming out. Investors will continue to gamble on them, but they’ll be fewer and further between.
Mid-budget AA games not in a niche will disappear. You’ll still have your city builders, your milsim squad shooters, your competitive RTS games, but you won’t be seeing many new AA action platformers, multiplayer CoD style shooters, block puzzlers, adventure RPGs, etc. They’ll either be bare budget / indie or mega budget.
You’ll see dev cost continue to be driven down to mitigate this risk, making quality suffer. Asset flips, AI, and outsourcing will increase for most studios that don’t get recurring revenue from live service games.
Indies will continue to be random breakout hits, but their studios will die fast because followups to their breakouts often drown in the sea too.
Being an employee in the industry will probably mean jumping from company to company where you might only stick around for 1 - 2 titles before a major layoff. Contracting will get more common.
Anyone who played Hollow Knight and knows Team Cherry does not need to read this article (but you might still have some fun reading some of the details!). The answer is exactly what you think it is - they are a small team and they made a new game as big as or bigger than the original Hollow Knight. There was never a dev hell moment. They just bit off a lot and never stopped chewing.
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