The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.
The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.
The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.
The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.
I have no better source than the person I replied to. I was on Reddit when the game was announced and it was clear that the game was about being gollum. Plenty of people were excited.
You can go back on reddit and look. Calling it revisionist is a bit of a stretch. The temperature on this game was very much mid to uninterested. Sure there were people who were excited, but it wasn’t a majority at all.
I was excited when it was first announced. I was hoping for a stealth game with gameplay like souls games or the shadow of mordor games. Sadly the game wasn’t even close to that so I didn’t buy it.
Those were your go-tos for gameplay expectations for sneaking around as a pretty weak little goblin man? I would’ve gone for Styx instead, a game about sneaking around as a little goblin man. (Which I think actually belongs to the same publisher)
Obviously combat would have to be balanced for Gollums powers. 1v1 an orc could have been fine but anything else would overpower him. I didn’t play Styx so I can’t compare it. I played the Splinter Cell Series and Dishonored, but both offered technology and weapons with range to help with sneaking. So I opted for games with a high fantasy setting. A game with controls like Souls, balanced for sneaking and ambushes as a focus, using the environment as your asset? Feels to me like it could work. Well, nothing like Souls, Shadow or Styx happened and we got whatever the Gollum game was.
I only played one for maybe like 2 hours, but they seem like pretty good games, you could probably pick one up for cheap on sale.
Also when I think of Soulslike Gollum, all I see in my mind is this gormless little creature wielding a 6 foot axe or something and that just makes me laugh.
Anyway, yeah, Nacon/Daedelic had several studios that had more experience making stealth-action games. I mean, besides the guys that made Styx, they also have the Shadow Tactics guys. Isometric tactical stealth could’ve been another option.
It’s honestly like they just made the absolute wrong decision for all things during development.
I could have seen it as a Stardew valley-esque Hobbit farming Sim, you start with simple farming, interacting with lore accurate villagers, fishing, cave gathering as Smeagol.
Then after a certain point of the game in a quest you find the Ring and your memories start getting hazy and your farming skill starts deteriorating and your cave gathering skills improve and the Ring blanks out part of your days and suddenly you find Deagols body and get flashbacks to what happened.
In the epilogue you start your usual day in the cave ‘bed’ instead of your Hobbit hole bed and you go gathering and meet Bilbo. Then cut to black
What was released was a disaster that hadn’t had anywhere near enough thought and consideration put into it. However, frankly if you don’t think a gollum game couldn’t be good I’d have to blame it on a lack of imagination.
CD Projekt announced on October 5 that the expansion starring Idris Elba cost a hefty 275 million Polish Zloty (around $62.7 million) to develop and approximately 95 million Polish Zloty (around $21.6 million) to market.
I’m not saying repairing and adding missing functionality isn’t a good size portion of that cost, but calling it a $125 million cost based on the cost of the expansion and marketing which were already planned regardless of how well the initial release did is miss-leading at best.
Yeah this headline should really just say the ~$41m they actually spent improving the game because that’s still an incredibly impressive number (2/3 the amount of a full expansion). I hate when there’s a good story to tell but they want to make it look even better so they decide to mislead instead of just saying the actually impressive thing
After Half-Life 2 and Bioshock Infinite, everyone learned that the best time to announce the game is when release is 3-6 months out. Especially since 2025 and maybe 2026 is a wash with GTA6.
Larian is somehow an independent enough to tell Hasbro to go fuck themselves but not independent enough that Hasbro told them to layoff people, and they said ‘okay’.
Larian worked with Hasbro to make BG3. Hasbro lays off people who helped them (from Hasbro). Larian doesn’t have much say about it other than “it sucks dude”.
Nobody at Larion got laid off. Larion worked closely with some people at Wizards of the Coast to make Baldurs Gate 3, and those people got laid off.
Larion could make a game entirely on their own with no involvement with Hasbro or WotC (and they have), but they can’t make anything related to Dungeons and Dragons or the Forgotten Realms without Hasbro and WotC’s cooperation.
if you dropped game to $30 from $60, would double or more people buy it? or would too many people see the lower price and think it must be a shitty game to be 'that low' and pass on it?
Fuck you, Ubi. Apart from all your shitty practices, it’s a 15-hour game that’s 40€ with a 50€ complete edition and cosmetics bullshit. That shit won’t fly anymore. I might get it in two years when it’s 10€, but only if your kill your launcher as a requirement.
edit: also, it came out a month ago. Learn to suck on the long tail of sales before you sacrifice your employees to Chtulhu, they’ll just make their own vaguely middle eastern platformers in Unity or UE and make more money than your shitty company.
You own the figure in the game, but don’t delude yourself into thinking you actually own this game. We reserve the right to remove your access to your property at our own discretion
Yo, remember when Disney gave EA exclusivity to Star Wars licensing, and for the duration of that exclusivity contract they rebooted one classic online multi-player shooter and then made a sequel that was one of the worst received games of the year and set the record for the highest dislike ratio on YouTube prompting Google to remove the dislike counter?
Apparently the Disney board doesn’t. Maybe someone should remind them.
Not even any tie-in games for the sequel movies, just a DLC map.
But EA clearly know how to rake in money with the yearly version of SportsGame 2021 2022 2023 2024. They are expected to make just as much cash by releasing the exact same movie every year. Who knows, maybe they’ll add microtransactions.
I’ve read somewhere else a couple of days ago that the official explanation is that without the public servers being live, reviewers would not get the full experience.
Not defending WB (I’m not interested in that game at all), just giving context.
Unless they’re having trouble getting them working, which isn’t encouraging for launch.
They at least have some working, they flew a bunch of streamers to LA for an event and had them stream the game a few weeks back.
Looked like a crackdown-ish game with DC character running around. Think like the Spider-Man games of the last few years but without the beloved characters
Reviewers getting copies a week before launch are generally netting like 40-50 hours of game time in a short timeframe. Combine that with the fact that it’d be more like hundreds of reviewers and you might actually have a decently active community.
I have seen it happen before when review outlets don’t get copies, but the game still turns out awesome. I think it happened for Doom Eternal.
It feels pointless to play devil’s advocate here though, since one way or another, I’m basically sure it’s going to be terrible. I just don’t like consigning internet opinion based on anything other than gameplay and actual reviews.
You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.
With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn't mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn't be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.
It’s the painting and detailing that can be quite expensive and time consuming. You obviously don’t have to paint your minis, but that’s the entire point for a lot of people.
Lots of stuff to bitch about with GW but prices aren’t one of them. Exhibit A is the article you’re responding to, they are responsible with their profits and put them where they should. Exhibit B is they could minimize costs and outsource the entire plastic operation but they still make all models in England. Exhibit C is paying for Art is always morally the correct thing to do, even when mass produced. Finally Exhibit D, fuck GW for promoting incredibly short lifecycles for their games and pushing an almost weekly FOMO event on products that leads a lot more to these profits than just model sales.
It’s playable and you can complete most of the content. There are bugs and you have to downgrade pre-NG, but it’s stable and the work they did is incredible.
This will come out about three days before skyblivion officially releases, in order to REALLY mess up Skyblivion, the same as they did for Fallout London.
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