MS usually buys competition to erase it so there’s nothing too surprising about this. And no, Bethesda and Blizzard won’t be treated very differently in the long run. That is after every material of everything the studios have ever worked on is fed into datasets to train AI for who knows what.
I’m a little surprised either of them have such a strong opinion about something EU related anyway, given it doesn’t affect them directly. Well I guess Louis is just really passionate about that stuff so it’s not all that surprising. As for Thor, maybe he’s using his online presence to kickstart a live service game himself? Obviously regulations are scary in that case. It’s a wild guess from my side but I think that would be on brand for him.
Let’s not pretend like Blizz or Bethesda will see the end of this decade anyway. Their fate was sealed when they got bought. Still, unionizing was the best thing employees could hope for. Good for them!
The industry’s effort to be more inclusive and diverse mostly comes from indie games, though. Of course AAA has long realized the potential to boost their image by copying some mechanics and ideas but let’s not pretend any of those CEOs on their high horses actually cares about inclusion. They’ll drop any efforts the very moment it doesn’t benefit them directly. But there will always be passionate indie developers pushing boundaries to actually help more people enjoy games.
I remember being very excited for the first one just to find it a little lackluster in the end and too cluttered with DLCs. Since then Frontier really has made a name for themselves as Paradox‘s little brother that litters their game with DLCs. Even as a fan of park sims, I‘ll pass on this one right away.
Fuckin Japan man. They just love their giga corporations way too much. Can‘t even have a single very successful indie studio in peace without throwing themselves at Sony.
Manor Lords is early access. At least one patch is to be expected. And of course the publisher is absolutely right. If my memory serves me well one dev developed the game all on his own so far and the challenge of meeting expectations after being a massive success is huge. Hiring more people to get developments going is likely necessary but expanding takes time. Some players have unrealistic expectations in general but even more so when it comes to small indie productions.
There already are a small number of games utilizing LLMs. Yes it‘s immersion breaking from time to time but the worst part is the credit system many of them use to pay for the API. If you go past your conversation limit, you‘ve got to pay extra.
At least I don‘t have to worry about Microsoft closing this studio soon. And not because I don’t think they wouldn’t do it. They absolutely would. It’s just that I wouldn’t care a bit.
What a terrible unnecessary and emotionally loaded strawman argument. I actually own the DLC and love BG3 just as I love Larian‘s other recent games. You‘re wrong about it being just cosmetics too. And it was Larian who made a HUGE deal about not tolerating any additional, paywalled content when the game had it from day 1. And so you now make a huge deal about how it somehow doesn‘t count because Larian is based or something. Just accept that they lied there just like they lie about shareholders and enjoy the video game like everyone else without treating the devs like your holy absolute.