Luckily nobody said there were zero well design AAA games, only that I don't much care if the big studios eat each other. You can always make another studio. It's happened before, it'll happen again. This isn't like car manufacturing where startups face overwhelming costs and regulatory burdens to begin work. Get some capital, hire some good devs, come up with a thoughtful concept, and people will pay for it. Shit, they'll pay for virtual goods with no expectation of seeing a finished game (coughStarCitizencough).
but there are experiences that cannot be replicated in the indie sphere at the moment
The key phrase there being "at the moment." And frankly the reverse is a lot more true for more enduring reasons. AAA development is entirely too invested in graphical fidelity at the expense of everything else and entirely too beholden to shareholders to take meaningful risks.
I do not give one tiny, insignificant shit what corpo entertainment goons do to each other or what hats they wear and neither should you. Blizzard as you knew it has been dead for years. This acquisition means nothing. The people that made the Blizzard you knew great can make their own company and probably will if they're still working. Stop caring about companies and start caring about the human beings that make good games. Remember their names, look at who they work for.
Game dev has to grow up just like Film did and you can expect the same market driven patterns to emerge. Indies take risks, the big boys iterate on the formulas they establish, and occasionally they stumble into something legitimately good. So it goes.
But for every big budget film that's good, you'll have a dozen Michael Bay style 'splosion and lens flare fests. That's the expected pattern.
Do people still like the shambling husk that is Blizzard at this point? I've been playing their games since Rock N' Roll Racing and they're not even close to the same company anymore.
Edit: Actually this guy signed onto Unity in 2014 Unity was still privately held. It went public in September of 2020. Unity's founder, David Helgason is still on their board and served as some sort of Senior Executive whatever position at Unity. Dude still has a 4% share of their stock.
So anyway, probably this David Helgason character who hired him. And/or whoever else (including Riccitiello!?) who was on the board at the time.
The relationship between CEOs and boards of directors is so fucked up and incestuous...
In any case and in retrospect, Johnny boy was 100% hired to cue them for up for the eventual IPO and boy did he ever. It's amazing how fast companies go down hill when they become publicly traded.
The truly horrifying combo is Battlemaster+Gloomstalker+Thief with a couple specific hand crossbows and the sharpshooter feat. All that Dex + 15 AC from Yuan-Ti scale mail they sell at last light means 4 attacks per round each and 20+ AC.
Oh, and stealth, and lockpicking. Astarion? Never heard of him.
Had to use a bonus action for something? Then you've got battlemaster ranged moves to fear, trip, or disarm. It's disgusting.
Sean Bean also voices most of Civ 6 and it's glorious. Say what you will about it from a mechanical perspective but I can't find fault with his voice lines. He gets to read some of the greatest quotations from history and for the most part he nails it.
Lol, one of the two options listed is what I'm using. Need to find something with support for fantasy stuff and if possible, alternative hacking rules. Hamish who wrote it mentioned he wasn't super happy with how it turned out.
I love that setting, but those mechanics. Ooof. Way too heavy. I actually meant the genre not the system. In reality I've been running The Sprawl but I'm looking for a narrative forward cyberpunk game that can accommodate urban fantasy.
The way this CEO operates is absolutely worthy of condemnation and viewing him through the lens of unfeeling cosmic horror is, if anything, a nicer take. But it's fair to say that people operating at that level of wealth have become detached from and profoundly alien to normal folk.
I don't think you're parsing this comic fairly or engaging with its content by labeling it "edgelord violence or insults."
Pretty much ALL of Hbomb's substantive examples from the video are from CTRL-ALT-DEL which is like ... the worst example imaginable. There's screenshots of PA's art, but beyond the one dumb gag about "stake me bro" he never really gets into PA's writing. ODD, THAT. Because if you actually read Jerry Holkin's posts, you'll find a level of writing that puts the lie to the notion that these are idiots making cheap, derivative work. Setting aside the fact that they've been doing this so long that they basically defined the genre.
And as an aside, really Harris, web comic artists as targets? You've done it, you've achieved the epitome of punching down. These and other extremely sane takes from the guy that brought you an almost 2 hour long video on the goddamn Roblox "oof" sound effect.