I am shocked. Not that the servers are shutting down, but that the servers even existed in the first place.
From the moment I saw the first trailer I thought a few things:
First, the concept seemed cool. I don’t like zombies and find them to be very uncompelling as an enemy type for various reasons, but to me the trailer seemed to show a game that was like if Project Zomboid played a bit like The Division or Ghost Recon. I never played The Division, but I have put a lot of time into Zomboid and many Ghost Recon games over the years. So the concept was incredibly appealing.
Second, the trailer looked 100% fake. That’s not to say that the assets didnt exist or anything, but rather it felt like a mobile game ad, where the trailer “gameplay” is way better than and completely different from the actual gameplay.
All in all, its impressive that the game actually existed, but it would have been better if the developers delayed the game (again) to keep working on actually making it function decently. And maybe making some original assets for it instead of purchased ones being used almost directly out of the box with minimal if any modification.
It is not surprising to see an older game continue to sell a lot, especially a child/family oriented game, on a child/family oriented console. A game with basically no real competition in its category.
Eh, gaming journalism just wants clicks to get ad-revenue. They would write an article about anything. Gabe waking up in the morning is news worthy to them.
I agree with the audio files for languages the player never plays, but 4k textures at a 1080p rendering resolution is not a problem.
Texture map size depends priparily on how the UV maps of models make use of the texture, and how close the camera is to the objects using that texture on average. A large wall texture will have more noticeable detail with a 4k texture than a distant tree in the skybox. The details will be visible on the wall whether the player plays in 720p or 8k, depending on how close the camera gets to it. You may be fine with environments looking like they were made for the Nintendo64’s 4kb of texture RAM, but 1080p players still gain massive benefits in graphics quality with 4k textures.