Ugh, I can already tell this is my deadline for my getting a GPU upgrade.
Hopefully the switch to a third-party engine means I won’t have to wait a year after release like I did with CP2077. I imagine this game has to be super important to Epic.
If I’m being honest, before Hades, I wasn’t sure how much of a future Supergiant had in game dev. They clearly have talent for making beautiful looking worlds with great soundtracks and writing, but their gameplay was not exceptional for the genres they dabbled in. They didn’t try to iterate either, flitting from genre to genre.
Hades was the result of them taking what they learned from Bastion and Pyre and applying it to a trend. They really nailed the gameplay this time. I think Hades 2 is even better, and I suspect it will be again be a GOTY contender when it comes out.
That said, I think they could very well end up branching out again from roguelites after this.
Very similar to that for films, the rating board process mostly regulates games in development. In the US, for example, the AO rating will prevent your game from being sold at mass market storefronts. When your game has borderline content, it’s a back-and-forth process that’s resolved before release.
Game content rating boards work (ESRB, PEGI, CERO, etc.). The difference here is there’s no pressure from the digital storefronts. They don’t have the same taboos on gambling that brick-and-mortar stores had on sex and violence in video games back when they started up.
Yuri’s original post has since been deleted. Erin Fitzgerald, the (second) voice of Chie, also said on Bluesky that she won’t be returning, along with Amanda Winn Lee, the voice of Yukiko, elsewhere:
I don’t know if Sega or Atlus did something to piss everyone off, if it’s some bizarre marketing stunt, or if the others just decided to pile on after Yuri went scorched earth on this. The whole thing’s pretty weird.
We don’t own our games anymore, so I need to know my library’s going to stick around if I’m going to invest in it. Last I heard, EGS hasn’t made a profit, so that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in me that it’ll still be around in five years.
I think competition is the answer to a lot of problems consumers face, but unfortunately the “are you going to be there tomorrow?” problem is going to be a major disadvantage for any storefront that competes with Steam. It’s why my most preferred shop is GOG, because I still have all my games with them if they close up.
I lived out this way once upon a time and miss it dearly. I never did get as far north as Tillamook Bay, but I have great memories of Lincoln City and Newport. Imagine my reaction when this game was announced, hah.
The photo in Chloe’s house of Arcadia Bay is one of Garibaldi, just mirrored. For plausible deniability, of course!
Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.