How can Breath of the Wild which was originally a Wii U release looks so much more refined and artistically appealing while running better than anything Gamefreak has made in the last 8 years?
In comparison to XC2 or 3, the recent pokemon games look like an insult, and a bad joke. I’m still mindblown by that Nintendo greenlit those releases, given how specific they are with other first-party game designs
IIRC BOTW was built on MonolithSoft’s engine (the devs behind Xenoblade) so in fairness, those games are more-so the same exception rather than the rule. That said, even without the comparison, GameFreak clearly did not properly optimize the Pokemon games on switch, with stuff like loading the whole map’s ocean at any given time.
also mr masuda said he was tired of pokemon in general, and will make this slop, this was all the way back sword and shield, when he shocked everyone about the half the dex being left out.
I'm waiting for when the US votes to get rid of libraries because it's hurting profits. This is an insane reason not to let people play games you can't even buy anymore.
Calling DA2 serviceable is probably some of the highest praise it’s received. The game is steaming dookie. It took out every single thing that made Origins a masterpiece and gave us a dialogue wheel and an entire game made of 5 copy+pasted rooms. Also a nonsensical main plot with no real player agency and the most forgettable ending of all.
DAI is mid af but it looks like a God damn masterpiece next to DA2.
If they hadn’t reused the maps it’d been remembered as one of the greats.
I also thought the balance on Nightmare or whatever was an atrocious mix of ubertank enemies and getting one-shot by rogues but the actual story and companions were fantastic.
What exactly do you mean by that? Like, he could have indeed been a well meaning mage just trying to live under templar thumbs? Instead of also being exactly the smoking gun?
The Orsino fight doesn’t make much sense if you side with the mages - there was no reason for him to go Akira monster when he did. Even BioWare acknowledged how little sense it made, in a conversation you can have with Varric in Inquisition.
Listen, it might’ve looked cheap as fuck, but I found a certain charm in the “every dungeon interior is just one of three dungeons with different parts blocked off”. Plus the combat flowed really well. I played that whole game through like… 5 times. One right after the other.
If you play it after coming off Mass Effect 1, the “every colony bunker or mine is one of three options” regardless of the planet just becomes part of that Old BioWare’s aesthetic.
Great ideas, cool combat system, great art style and graphics, ruined by writing that was somehow chaotic and utterly predictable at the same time and stupid ass kill ten rats/fetch 10 letters filler quests.
Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov (the lead artist) formed their own company Red Info in 2023. I will only recognise a game as Disco Elysium’s successor if it comes from them.
This might be a controversial opinion, but please hear me out: this guy is absolutely overhyped.
I saw the entire ZA/UM situation from the outside without having ever played Disco Elysium before, so I don’t have any stake or bias in what happened. In my personal opinion there are 2 important notes: Yes, Kurvitz is responsible for the creation of one of the best games of all time. He also is a massive asshole who abuses his workers. Both of these can be true and don’t contradict each other.
I can really recommend the Documentation by People Make Games about it, I think they made great and very neutral reporting on it, getting everybody’s side of the story. But one think becomes increasingly clear throughout the video: the original creator is a huge egomaniac.
I came to dislike him the more I heard him talk. He spouts how he comes from this underground punk scene, but also betrays every value that he should hold. He doesn’t think his workers are important and that they should just endure his wrath at all times. He doesn’t see how multiple people can be of importance to a project besides him of course. As soon as the money came in he threw every value he said he’d hold aside to become a huge capitalist, even going so far as making his own shell company that preemptively held the rights to a sequel just so he can profit from it more.
This entire situation is his fault. A “punk” ignores all his anticapitalist values, gives all his intellectual property to a capitalist, capitalism ensues and he becomes bitter because he didn’t get a greater slice of the pie.
Let me be clear: I think a sequel should involve him. But I also believe he shouldn’t be in a lead game designer position, more of a “lead story designer/writer”. He has shown to not be all to competent in that and he WILL abuse his workers again. Somebody needs to be above him to manage his insanity.
Nothing against you, but I think endlessly hyping him up won’t lead to that or even a good outcome. He will squander everything that he will be given. He is not a good person, he is a “Rockstar Developer” and I mean that as an insult.
Shitty people are abundant in the creative industries, I have no delusions about that. Probably even more of those that have no public presence. But that has no bearing on whether or not he should retain sole ownership of his work. It’s an entirely separate issue. Andrzej Sapkowski is also a massive douchebag, but nobody would deny that The Witcher is his property.
I totally agree. Problem is just that he legally sold it, so he kinda fucked himself on that. It’s also interesting to see how nobody in that situation seemed to have good intentions, just a bunch of assholes all around
I’m not convinced that is the case. The studio was purchased by a holdings company, then its CEO bought four early sketches of DE from the studio for pocket change. When Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere (writer) objected, they were demoted and later fired. Unless another exchange took place, I don’t see how this would amount to Kurvitz selling his rights; at the very least, he still owns Sacred And Terrible Air (with DE itself naturally belonging to the studio).
There are also some pretty chill creative people who don’t care about the money and the fame much. Even though having money is nice and makes your life much easier.
Marketing is a big money drain for a lot of games too. Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V are two games with marketing budgets big enough to finance a dozen other games. I guess a new title like cyberpunk would need more marketing (still not $142 million worth of marketing) but GTA was already a well established franchise that probably didn’t need as much marketing as it had.
Even games like call of duty and assassins creed which have a core fan base that can expect a new game on a regular basis don’t need to market as much as they do.
I think marketing is always important no matter how established you are. Coca Cola aren’t skimping on their marketing budget even if they’re the most recognizable brand in the world.
It’s about constantly reminding everybody “hey, I exist! Don’t you want to buy me?”.
I was just talking about this the other day. I think Coke and some companies have reached a saturation point that makes advertisements useless.
I dont know if we have any data to model off of, but I’d love to see if their profits dip by any meaningful amount if they stopped advertising for 3 months straight. Let the movie theaters, and the restaurants, and the culturally embedded soft drink preferences do their thing and see if the dial moves.
I don’t think they would keep investing in marketing if they didn’t know if it worked. I’m just guessing, but I believe there’s a noticeable bump in sales after a successful marketing campaign.
And that’s what I think they’re failing to measure. I think they’re unable to accurately divorce the increase in sales from other incentives/market forces, and so they’re just doing what they’ve been doing regardless of actual merit, or the merit is being improperly evaluated
Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be marketing at all. Just that marketing budgets for many AAA blockbusters have become so bloated, they can account for nearly half of the development cost. As someone with very little knowledge as to how games get made, it seems like some of that money could be better used
I think I played maple story in like 2007 and it was garbage then. My excuse at the time was I was broke, and there weren’t many good free games out. Path of Exile wasn’t until 2013. Same with Warframe. Huh I never realized those came out the same year.
I get that, but to me it all feels like cookie cutter material. Maybe I’m not searching right, and maybe I haven’t discovered enough, but I can’t help but feel extremely whelmed.
In terms of exploration, it’s very similar to No Man’s Sky, another boring space game. Every planet has similar terrain, similar plants and animals, similar goals, and similar structures. The differences are ambient light shades, colors and patterns on the plants and animals, and clutter in the artificial areas. The player can go scan life forms and blast bad guys. That’s about it.
But I don’t see how it could be any other way. How else does a studio scale up a galaxy such that every one of the 1000-odd planets is its own unique, interesting, engaging snowflake of a setting without spending hundreds of employee-years on each one?
Maybe AI will be the answer, but I’m not holding my breath.
Skyrim and fallout were also complete Games when they were released. However, they were buggy disasters. It took tons of modders to fix them and make them what they are today.
And bethesda didn’t have to lift a finger.
… but don’t let me get in the way of that blind loyalty of yours. You’ve got that “new game honeymoon” thing going on. You should enjoy it while it lasts.
Isn’t that kinda the entire point to Bethesda games and has been since at least oblivion? The modability of their games has long been their big selling point.
If the selling point it’s that they require mods to work correctly, and they don’t pay those that out in the countless hours to make them, they shouldn’t make games. Period.
Because video games aren't for recreation, they're there to make them money. Tells you all about what the fuck is wrong with the gaming industry and why so many people stick to indie titles now.
I dunno, I’m someone who was fine with the changes to combat introduced in Doom Eternal, but was honestly really turned off by how much id was kinda huffing their own farts with the story. The first game had Doomguy punch any attempts at exposition. The second turned Hayden into an Angel, the AI friend into God, the demons are extraplanar aliens that are being used for energy by the angels, and now the Doom Slayer is some destined force of cosmic balance. The little bits were of larger lore were kinda funny in the first game, it became flanderized in the second, and now for a prequel I’m worried id’s managed to fit their entire head up their own ass trying to convince everyone how cool their space marine is.
Yeah, the exposition was part of what made DE weaker to me. Too much plot lead to losing the plot. The gameplay was fun enough overall, and I enjoyed a lot of the changes. But it was also too fuckin much keyboard ballet and pattern recognition for my tastes. If I want to kill something in a way that’s not the prescribed way, I want to be able to do that. But it became a formula and that’s not a playstyle I like because it bores me. It becomes math homework. Couple that formulaic approach with the fuckin massive swarms of unrelenting enemies and you end up having to fight like a robot. I preferred the 2016 mantra of fight like hell.
God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.
I have mixed feelings here, because on one hand, I actually do see where this guy is coming from. I’m a game design student on a degree course structured around live client briefs and projects for contests (ie, the stuff we make has to work for people outside the university, not just ourselves), and as design lead for the first project of the course, I was fighting with a member of my own team about design decisions throughout the entire project. Dude with zero capacity for empathy spent a considerable amount of energy arguing about how it was a waste of time developing the relationship between the characters in what was explicitly supposed to be a character-driven story. The words “character-driven” were literally in the brief, and right up until the last day he was insisting it was a waste of time focusing on the characters. So I really, really feel the Starfield design lead’s frustration on the “stop arguing about shit you know nothing about” front.
On the other hand, I don’t feel it’s very professional to air this frustration in public. If people don’t like Starfield, then they don’t like it, and the design lead complaining about it on social media isn’t going to change that, nor does it paint Bethesda in a good light. It just makes him look a bit petty, I guess?
I guess it all comes down to whether the product meets expectations. Players are disappointed in Starfield, and even if they don’t know why design decisions were made, it doesn’t change the fact that the game hasn’t achieved what it was meant to achieve. People that spent a lot of money buying it have a right to feel annoyed, and being told “I’m right, you’re wrong” by the design lead isn’t helpful. And if the project does meet expectations, and it’s only a few assholes complaining, then nobody needs to say “I’m right, you’re wrong” because the end results speak for themselves. If Starfield had been a massive, widely-loved success, a few armchair devs saying “you should have done X, Y and Z instead” wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Just because I don’t know how a turd sandwich was made and because I don’t know all that went into making the turd sandwich doesn’t make the turd sandwich taste any better.
He could have worked his ass off to make the turd sandwich, but it doesn’t mean we can’t criticize it and have to like it.
The difference here is you were having arguments with someone during development. It’s easy to look at a successful final product and say “that guy had no clue what he was talking about about!”
Bethesda is saying the same thing about their fans, but for a final product that’s not very good. It’s one thing to dismiss criticism during your process, but to dismiss criticism after you present your results is basically saying you are never open to it.
Yeah, I agree with you there. Sorry if the point wasn’t clear in my post. Like, I do legitimately understand where his frustration is coming from, because I don’t doubt for a minute that he and the rest of the team worked their asses off, and unfortunately there is a tendency for people who know nothing about game dev to think they’re experts in it (you know, the way there is for every subject.) But just because his emotional reaction to the criticism of Starfield is valid, the way he’s behaving is not okay.
And honestly, on our course we’ve had the “you’ve got to have a thick skin in this industry, because you will spend ages making something that your boss or the fans will tell you they don’t like, and you’ve just got to deal with it and fix it” talk three times already. Criticism is tough to hear, but unless what you did was so shit that it got you fired, you take the criticism and you do better next time. Seems like Emil Pagliarulo might have skipped those lessons?
I haven’t played this game and I’m not really apprised of what the players’ dissatisfactions are, as I’ve not been paying attention to it.
But as a working game dev, he is 100% right about that. One thing that seems… unique to gamers as hobbyists is how confident they are in their opinions and assumptions about the how and the why. It’s pretty frustrating. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the outcome. But 97% of the rest of what gamers have to say beyond that is toilet paper.
I haven’t played it yet either (waiting for the price to come down, and I’m largely withholding judgement until I’ve played it myself), but my understanding is essentially it’s not a bad game, and if it had been launched 10 years ago, or from a much smaller studio, it wouldn’t have attracted so much criticism. But it’s using what is now a very old engine (and a notoriously buggy one, which I can confirm from having played other games with the same engine) which limited its potential. My feeling is it was a difficult decision either way: do you keep using the engine that the dev team has spent the last decade learning inside and out, or do you switch to something newer with more capabilities but then have the enormous challenge of retraining everyone? I don’t envy that choice.
I’m expecting to enjoy Starfield but not be wowed by it. But that’s fine, because I’m fine with playing games where I go “I enjoyed that” rather than “this changed my life”, and it’s also pretty rare for me to really dislike a game.
But… yeah, definitely sticking with my thinking that I totally understand the guy’s frustration with the way gamers so often think they know more than they do, but I don’t think his public response is very professional.
I waited until it dipped below $50 recently to pick it up. I knew it was not being reviewed well and a couple of my friends were happy with it.
It is a pretty game, but it is not a good game by any reasonable measurement. The story does not pull you in. The main characters are not engaging. The big city you visit feels like its full of paper dolls wearing one of 5 sets of clothing moving around in ways that makes zero sense.
What really drove me crazy was that they pair you up with a bot that walks around with you but it gets in the way all the time. Its walking on top of you most of the time.
The biggest beef I have is that I have played all of the Bethesda games since Morrowind, I even beat that game. I don’t care that Oblivion is silly and full of dumb. Its one of my favorite games because of the story development and the characters and the expansive world that is full of life. The people moving in the towns feel like they are going somewhere. The towns feel like they are put together with meaning. Skyrim is a high water mark in video gaming. We don’t even need to get into that.
Starfield falls flat many times. The enemy AI is stupid as anything I have ever experienced.
Its not a BAD game, its just not a good game. The graphics arn’t even very special.
Consumers don’t need to know how the sausage is made, but they sure as fuck know if it tastes good. Ignoring criticism because consumers don’t know how the sausage machine broke is how you get endless news articles pointing and laughing at Bethesda.
The customer is always right goes beyond the literal words. Perchance it’s a lesson that needs relearned.
I’m a creative and a designer myself. My philosophy is that at the end of the day the products should be judged by its result. It’s unfortunate because consumers often do not truly appreciate the amount of blood and trouble that goes into works when creatives feel they deserve a break sometimes. Again, at the end of the day, providing explanations why the game is shit is not going to make the game less shit.
I completely agree! The guy can totally feel frustrated because he knows how hard his team worked, work that the consumers largely don’t appreciate, but he can’t argue people into liking the game if they don’t like it.
Of course they will. Don’t they deserve to be paid for their work? They’re making a fairly niche product and constantly making improvements to it. What’s to complain about?
$404 divided over 10 years is different than as a lump. But getting the whole bundle for 80% off because it’s been successfully developed for 10 years is value.
I always find this discussion interesting. I don't personally tend to play Paradox games at all so I've no real horse in the race, but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the model. It's designed around people being able to buy the specific parts they want, and those specific things having a good level of quality / depth to them.
Like, if you're really into early 20th century Japanese architecture, would you rather have a single house thrown into a "kitchen sink" DLC pack that you can copy-paste over and over into your city with no options to customise or expand on that, or would you prefer an entire DLC dedicated to that style so you can build a full district or city in that style?
And conversely, if you're not into early 20th century Japanese architecture, would you rather have a single house in that style thrown into your DLC pack that you don't care about and won't ever use, or would you prefer your DLC pack to contain things you are interested in?
Maybe the average consumer does look and think "wow, I really need to spend $404.40 to be able to play the game" and decide against it, I don't know. But personally, if I see a game has DLCs like "specific niche cosmetic option pack #2" then I see them as not at all necessary, and figure I can play the base game first and just buy any additional packs I want later.
C:S1 is basically designed around most players not buying every DLC. You only buy the ones you want. Also, wait for a sale. $404 over the entire time the game has been out is also not that bad. Sure, buying it all at once it’s a lot, but the player buying every DLC has probably been playing since launch. Think of it as a subscription for new content. You can not subscribe and still get plenty of content (every DLC added stuff to vanilla for free), or you can pay the fee to get everything. If this is your genre, you want to give then money to keep making improvements. If they don’t make money you don’t get anything new.
I picked up I think literally every DLC for CK2 a few months before CK3 was announced. It’s was maybe $50. I think much less (although I already owned the base game and maybe a few DLCs). No one is expecting new players to purchase that at retail price. The sale price is the actual price for a new player. I don’t think it actually really scares anyone off. If you want a city builder, there’s only one option. You stick it on your wishlist for a sale and buy what you want.
The weird loot range issue, where if you’re not standing in juuuuust the right angle, you won’t be able to loot certain corpses or containers.
The fact that, outside of combat, controlling Geralt feels like driving a boat. Weird large turn radiuses, slow start and stop, etc… The devs did this to make his movement look more natural, but it feels like the game is constantly fighting against or trying to correct your inputs.
Combine those two things together, and you get a consistently frustrating experience outside of combat. Installing a ranged loot mod was one of the biggest quality of life upgrades. You walk near a corpse or container, and it automatically gets looted.
The combat can also get repetitive at times, and the difficulty scaling is weird too. But as long as those two things and still deliver a good story, I think players will ultimately walk away happy.
I feel like the repetitive combat is more a result of combat that actually encourages dodging and using signs rather than just standing still and slicing while the enemy either hits or not based on RNG, and the fact that in combat you truly are jumping around, dodging, parrying, etc. makes it more true to the source material.
The style of combat in The Witcher 3 also makes it so that if you do find yourself in a much higher level fight than you should be you can with enough tries manage to beat it. I had one playthrough where I took on the werewolf quest while too low level for it, didn’t preserve any saves before the no turning back point for the battle. In order to save my save file I had to keep trying and failing to defeat the werewolf until I finally got the hits and dodges just perfectly enough to defeat the werewolf. It sucked but ultimately it was possible to complete and not just by an attempt with golden RNG rolls results
Morrowind is the best. Oblivion remaster is better than skyrim (in my Morrowboomer opinion) and that was just refreshing a 20 year old game. I feel like there is a lot of hype for TES6 that it may not live up to, but surpassing skyrim is definitely doable.
Honestly TES6 has one thing going for it and that’s that Skyrim is over a decade old now so matching the scale and scope of Skyrim is much more achievable.
In my opinion when a sequel falls flat or is outshined by an earlier entry in the series, it’s usually because the studio messed with the formula for the gameplay, not because of a change in characters
Oblivion and Skyrim were both massive disappointments to me.
If ES 6 comes out, it’ll have maybe three skills - magic/combat/sneak. Any interesting/complicated lore will be retconned and shoved aside. (Why wasn’t Cyrodil a jungle? Where are my river drakes? What happened to Sutch? Where is my Colovian armor set?)
He apparently worked on Oblivion (and Skyrim), so there’s a chance. He took a chance on Starfield and failed, so hopefully he learns from that instead of doubling down.
I thought the same thing about Cyberpunk, they couldn’t make lightning strike twice. But in the end, once the issues were fixed, it’s also one of my favorite modern games.
PS5 game on sale did cost 2 EUR less than the regular price on Steam. I don’t think Steam overcharges me. It’s not like the game is cheaper somewhere else on PC either: …epicgames.com/…/banishers-ghosts-of-new-eden-f9e… (50 EUR)
Yes, but they sue Steam that has competitors selling games for the same price instead of literal monopolies. Even Apple was forced to open up to other app stores.
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