I remember the exact moment when death of XBOX console basically started. It was XBOX One announcement where Don Mattrick messed up the rollout so bad no one knew how their always online DRM system worked. Sony made this video in response. Also there is this disaster of an interview where he said gamers should buy XBOX 360 if you can’t be online 24/7. Microsoft basically took it for granted that gamers were in their pocket and they could focus on dominating the livingroom by adding tv related features that gamers didn’t care about. Also Kinect was initially mandatory which made the console $100 more than PS4. XBOX lost console marketshare and they never recovered since then.
That sounds about right. I remember the 360 being huge and nobody having a ps3, but now I’m not sure I know a single person who bought an xb1 or whatever the current one is called.
there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare… In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises… Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
Ironically, EA grew out of Origin, one of the original grand-daddies of computer RPGs and the maker of the Ultima series in the 1980s-1990s.
Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.
But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.
The game they killed 3 days after release might have been good but i haven’t seen a single gameplay video or have any idea of what the game was about. Are they that scared of releasing a shit game and keeping it playable but dead for a while?
I mean, they spent what 400 millions on developing it and they won’t spend 10k - 100k to keep that game running for a while? Like “NO NOT A SINGLE CENT MORE SPENT ON THAT SHIT GAME!” XD
Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.
I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.
I played a dead MMO where i was the only person in the game. They where shutting down the servers soon and it was an interesting experience. The game wasn’t bad honestly. As a single player experience at least. Maybe that was the issue.
It had matchmaking so if there weren’t enough players it would take a long time and you’d end up in the same lobbies with the same players every time, if you could even get in apparently. Not like you could play solo even if you wanted to.
Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.
Yes, they’re a publisher. They supposedly have/had a small team working on a Blade Runner game, but they have yet to release a game they developed on their own. Publishing is their thing, so Annapurna Interactive is kinda fucked. I mean, jeez, it looks bad, I mean they all walked out.
I really wouldn’t call it leaning into AI, they are using it for doing basic boring work and the CEO has even said he’s not even sure it actually helps that much with productivity. It’s really weird seeing the actual statements from Swen Vincke and then comparing it to articles saying he’s “heavily pushing AI” into employees, that just isn’t what’s happening.
I dislike AI as much as the next guy, but when even Clair Obscur launches with a few AI generated textures we have to just admit that AI is going to be used to some degree in a larger studio. So long as it doesn’t end up in the final product I don’t really care that much, it’s just kind of annoying.
Well clearly we do when even Clair Obscur gets caught with AI generated assets in a fully released project and gets away with absolutely no hit to their reputation simply because they refuse to comment on it. I would rather more devs come out and talk about their AI use like Swen Vincke has done here instead of keeping it under wraps for fear of the mob dragging their reputation through the mud for daring to even look at the thing. Maybe then more devs would get real information on how useless AI is as a proper creative tool.
Among the devs responding is a former Larian staffer, environment artist Selena Tobin. “consider my feedback: i loved working at @larianstudios.com until AI,” Tobin writes. “reconsider and change your direction, like, yesterday. show your employees some respect. they are world-class & do not need AI assistance to come up with amazing ideas.”
Honestly I’m prepared for LLM style sloppy writing. You don’t generate “placeholder concept art”. You just replaced a concept artists job and put the first ingredient for an AI slop game in your pipeline.
Jason Schreier released the full transcript of the interview and Swen Vincke never said they had “placeholder concept art” actually, he said that the artists had used AI to generate images that they then used as reference while drawing concept art. In the full interview he doesn’t even seem particularly impressed with AI, says that it doesn’t improve productivity much and implies that it is disappointing. I honestly respect Larian for actually coming out and sharing their experiences with using AI, even if I agree they should probably stop using it entirely, rather than doing what most other studios do and simply hide it under a rug and refuse to talk about it.
I really don’t think we should be using AI, I just think that it’s entirely unfair to describe Swen Vincke as “pushing AI” and I respect that he was willing to talk openly about it. However judging by the rabid hatred from everyone online I doubt he will ever talk about it again. Most developers that are using AI are almost definitely just keeping it quiet to avoid controversy right now. The Clair Obscur devs avoided the controversy of literally launching a game with AI generated content by quickly patching the game and refusing to give a statement to any journalist who tried to contact them about it and I suspect this will be the way going forward.
I need some piece of LLM generated code to make it into some critical TCP library that’s used for the internet everywhere.
Maybe then I can get some peace from the individuals that cry when a company mentions they used LLMs.
Aside: This looks like a proper use of LLMs - we’re not displacing artists with something trained on stolen art. Maybe it impacts some interns that needed to create PowerPoints.
Edit: Fine. I’m wrong. Vote with your wallet and don’t buy the game.
Except for the “developing concept art” bit. That’s not some unimportant intern’s work and does have the potential to displace artists. And while no AI-generated content may make it into the game, it does suggest that there will be art in the game that’s based on the AI-generated content. That’s what concept art is for, after all.
To add to this, concept art is one of the places I would least like AI to be used in. It utterly fails at being creative and actually creating something fundamentally NEW and the more we use it the more our media will just devolve into remixed homogeneity.
I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.
Just finished Chapter 3 of 8. It has some very classic Telltale foibles. Sometimes the script seems to assume you made a decisions that you didn’t make and it makes the dialogue feel awkward. Other times, the sarcastic tone in a written dialogue choice isn’t clear when you select the option and the resulting scene isn’t at all what you thought you were suggesting. I suspect by the time I am done, I’ll have the general sense of “oh, my decisions didn’t ACTUALLY matter,” as is Telltale tradition, but I’m not far enough to judge in that space yet
Despite these fairly common for Telltale problems, it’s an incredibly witty and entertaining piece of entertainment, and perhaps one of better “no, seriously, there’s a game in here” Telltale products. The “dispatch” mechanic is, imo, a fun management game, and they tie it into the narrative in ways that feel clever. Everyone is at each others throats because of a story beat? People are actively sabotaging each other on the job and it’s making your job as their dispatcher harder. As a comedy and near-film, the writing is laugh-out-loud funny, the voice acting and character animation is top notch, and there’s an interesting story and world holding it all together. I’m sure people will argue that it’s a better movie than it is a game, and, as much as I enjoy the corporate dispatcher half of the game, I am sure many will agree, as the dialogue writing is truly the stand-out element of the game.
It’s very good. Not perfect, but very good, and compared to the older Telltale games, a real home-run.
Interesting that you felt the game assumed you made choices you didn’t, I hadn’t ran into that despite very frequently picking the less popular options. I won’t ask for specifics for obvious reasons, but that does make me curious whether there was a bug or a gap in logic. Definitely not a flawless game as gamepad is a very flawed input option when things get hectic, but damn the writing and action sequences had me hooked immediately.
Still can’t believe my first time through was only 7.5 hours. Can’t wait to go through with different choices.
I think they mean how the suggested responses were summarised, sometimes when you choose that dialogue option it doesn’t always say the thing it suggested in exactly the way you were expecting,. Personally I found it on point and did fit within the parameters of the summarisation. My 17yo son played it and loved it so much he made me sit and play it with him, and I noticed that he didn’t pick up on what some of the dialog summaries meant. Whereas old and ancient me, whose been around the block a fair bit, understood the nuances behind them all.
I’m going to spoiler it and talk about it, because I am genuinely interested in other people’s opinion/experiences on this.
Spoilers for late chapter 1, early chapter 2This is mostly centered around the kiss. Save the “proposition” innuendo, it became pretty clear that Blonde Blazer’s whole schtick was to recruit Robert. Even in the moment when she moved close to him, she kind of sizes him up like someone looking at a horses teeth as opposed to someone losing themselves in the eyes of a prospective lover, so I didn’t kiss her, and save making a joke on the “proposition” comment, didn’t say anything overly romantic of flirty. This made the whole conversation the next day feel weird and out of place. It was toned like Robert DID kiss her, as Blazer just constantly apologized, and the responses I had options for (“I don’t think it was a mistake” met with “it was, for reasons I’ll explain later”) kept that same awkward connotation. Blonde Blazer acted like she did something incredibly inappropriate in… being slightly drunk when she offered Robert a job? But as a result of my options, there really was nothing to act like this about. But the conversation HAD to be toned this way, otherwise Invisigirl overhearing and responding with “what, you two fuck?” wouldn’t make any sense. The game didn’t “assume I made choices I didn’t” as much as they clearly wrote it with an expectation in mind, but my choices didn’t meet those expectations, leaving the whole section flowing weird.
Oh okay I see what you’re saying, but I took it as more than just that.
spoiler for the same eventShe was being flirty with him while not just on the job but also in a relationship, and for some that’s enough for them to feel guilty. Yes, at this point Robert didn’t know about the relationship at this point, but from his POV he’d still read that guilt for what he saw might have been a signal he missed.
I’m sure you probably have more than just that one example, but in this instance I didn’t see it as being off from my decisions I guess. Overall, I felt the writing was pretty well done across the board.
Gameplay - quick time events weren’t super annoying (I wasn’t a fan of telltale batman quick time events), I personally liked the hacking minigame (though not everyone did), and the actual “dispatch” segments were tons of fun.
The story was excellent - I kept expecting a “twist” like we’ve seen in a lot of superhero media recently, and there weren’t any big twists. I think this was a good thing, it’s nice to see more of a “reconstruction” of good guy vs bad guy.
Spoilers - ::: spoiler spoiler If there is a twist, it’s that Shroud’s actually kinda stupid with common sense things - no grand plot, he’s just good at math and let it get to his head. Letting Robert live since he was “unimportant” really was just Shroud missing an opportunity. Not having Toxic kill him in the first scene really was just shitty planning, and probably the need to be a drama queen in the warehouse and the need to defeat Mecha Man, not some “I am your father” type moment like some theories were suggesting.
I enjoyed this a lot, even though it meant a lot of theories around the game didn’t pan out.:::
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