It'll prevent indie artists from having their work plagiarized over and over without payment from indie "devs" who honestly shouldn't have the right to exist as "developers" if they can't afford to actually hire artists and such.
It'd be one thing if they made an agreement to get assets from artists for cheap or for free as a favor, but just plain putting them all out of business permanently by letting a machine steal their work forever is another thing entirely.
Not shocking. I just hope people learn from this and react by not getting into the gaming industry until the shortage of workers forces it to change. Same thing with the entertainment industry outside of gaming at large.
The way the movie / tv industry treats most of its employees who aren't at the very top is just horrible, and if people didn't have such stars in their eyes for Hollywood and such, working conditions would be so much better all around, along with pay and mandatory breaks.
I've been in the entertainment industry, and so has my sister. It's amazingly how terrible people are treated, including crew and lower end actors, and all for a product that's not really necessary or all that important for the survival of the world. People don't think about it, but we've been around for MILLIONS of years without TV and Movies. Sure there were plays and such, but it doesn't take much for humanity to amuse itself. Simple conversations, board games, some sticks and balls... if the writer / actor strikes kept going on, and new content stopped coming out, it'd suck at first, but we'd get used to it.
From the grapevine, it's less that it sucks, more like it's meh. 7/10 and all that. Exactly what you'd expect from Skyrim / Fallout 4 in space, but somehow more bland in terms of characterization and storyline.
Same Bethesda shallowness and jank. People who just like exploring a big universe and doing repetitive stuff mindlessly will enjoy it, people who want more choice and character interaction with a compelling story probably will not.
It's kind of like the old Bethesda / Bioware split, except that Bioware's basically dead now, and Larian's doing what they used to do, but possibly better in some ways. Then there's Obsidian who used to be like Bioware / Bethesda but better in the past, but nowadays they seem content to just try to copy Bethesda while adding some "quirkiness" and hoping it'll work.
Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint's Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they've made some bad moves lately.
I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint's Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they'd just made Saint's Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.
At the point where they decided to "reboot" to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn't get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who'd only heard of and experienced Saint's Row 4 would get excited about.
They could've probably taken Saint's Row up to 6 entries if they'd just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn't know, I got distracted and didn't play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could've probably stayed in business if they'd just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible "free to play" multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.
Glad they're taking a break, and hope things work out for them. Making games is tough, and making games like this which are more on the niche side can't have been easy, especially since the profits probably weren't stellar either.
Honestly, given how toxic Destiny 2's monetization can be, along with its FOMO, I'm not surprised. That + the grind was why I quit. It got tiring and repetitive, especially the buy to play seasons.
Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.
This trailer... was okay? I don't know why, but it kind of felt like a more modern version of Communist space propaganda. Very by the numbers, predictable, and a little corny. The game'll probably be alright (most likely just Fallout 4 with more sci fi + vehicles in Space with less trashy looking environments) but this trailer's not getting me very excited.
I'll probably wait a few months for the bugs and issues to get ironed out and give it a shot on Xbox Game Pass. Plus, the longer I wait, the more mods get made, and the mods are what really make Bethesda games good.
Geforce Now has been good the few times I've tried it (note that I have Cable internet with a direct ethernet connection to my computer and I don't use wi-fi) but there's just barely enough latency that those who are latency sensitive can notice it.
Fine for slower paced games, but potentially an issue for faster paced ones depending on how hard they are.
Me too. If the sales aren't high enough, Microsoft may reconsider and decide to sell it on the PS5 (probably with some DLC included) a year later or so. It cost them a whole lot of money to buy all those companies, including Bethesda, and they're going to eventually have to recoup a profit from those purchases.
If that means releasing on Playstation again, I think they'll do it rather than risk losing money. Even Disney has learned with Disney+ that having your own exclusive platform and not sharing isn't great business sense. It costs them a lot of money every month to host everything and produce content, and if they don't license out that content to competitors, they can't make their money back.
I can see Microsoft learning the same lesson. Especially given that Disney+ hasn't been profitable ever, and now the red ink is starting to catch up with Disney. If keeping big games from big studios starts losing Microsoft a lot of money, I think they'll fold, at least partially.
Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda's recent track history, it's not negative to be skeptical, it's smart.
Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most "bug free launch in history" it's still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Plus, the recent release of Baldur's Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples' standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we're aware that they're going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.
Bethesda's been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn't be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren't being mindlessly negative, they're looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.
We also like games that ask players for feedback, then take it and test it in the game and improve the game with it if it works. As opposed to recycling the same ubisoft tower climbing + shallow collectible fetch quest-a-thon for the 100th time while wondering why people are getting bored and not buying the sequels.
Nobody really expects RPG's to be as big and deep as BG3, they just want a complete game that works without shitty microtransactions everywhere and always online for no reason. Plus, having interesting characters and storylines, quests that can be solved in more than one way, and gameplay that's actually formed by taking player feedback and listening to it is what people reacted well to, among other things. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't even have Denuvo!
If there's one thing that I hope competitors learn from Larian and BG3, it's that respecting your players and giving them what they want leads to success. Similar to Elden Ring and from software, like that video mentioned. Now compare BG3 to Diablo 4 and Immortal, or the upcoming Starfield and you'll see why people love it. It's not about specs or scope, it's about designing a game to be actually FUN.
Honestly, things like this were why I thought that Blu-Ray drives would take off. It's why I bought a Blu-ray RW drive in 2014 for my PC build because I thought it would be the future as game and media sizes would only get bigger and more of a pain to download.
I was wrong, but I wish I hadn't been. At least I can rip my PS3 Blu-rays to play them on emulators now. It's hard to go back and play them at 720p on a big screen without all the features that emulators give me. Rendering at 1440p (minimum) just being the start.