Pre-ordering existed for the customer’s benefit back when all games were physical and you wanted to guarantee you’d have a copy available for you at launch. At some point, companies realized that they could use it to forecast success or, more nefariously, entice you to buy a stinker of a game before you’ve had time to hear that it sucks. I haven’t bought physical games in a while now, but when I did, the last time I had a hard time acquiring one at launch was more than 20 years ago (I remember Halo 2 being the mile marker for when companies got to be pretty good at meeting demand). In the digital space, it makes even less sense. They still do pre-order incentives sometimes, for the same reason as above, even when the game is good, but the bonuses are so throwaway anyway that it usually doesn’t matter. Digital storefronts on PC have a pretty good refund policy, so if you’re diligent enough, you can pre-order the day before it comes out, get the bonus, let the dust settle on review scores, and decide if you want to keep the game with the pre-order bonus or just refund it. There’s very little risk in that. Without a pre-order bonus, there’s absolutely no reason to bother, and quite frankly, I don’t feel good about supporting those bonuses in the first place.
I have no issue with early access games, especially if the game lends itself to the model, which would be anything sufficiently sandboxy that can be heavily modified by changing some variables or adding a single mechanic. Larian’s RPGs are very freeform in the ways they let you solve problems and can be upended by different powerful abilities and whatnot; roguelikes are perfect for this model, because you’re replaying them a lot anyway; regardless of genre, the ones that would catch my eye are the ones that are looking for gameplay feedback and not outsourcing QA for finding bugs to a bunch of paid customers. The real problem with early access for me now is that there are so many finished games coming out all the time that look interesting that it’s difficult to justify playing one that’s not done.
Pillars of Eternity II is one of my favorites, if you haven’t played it, and I loved Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 this year. I do consider Avowed to be more of an action game than an RPG though.
I thought I’d share this because it captures the state of the market right now, as seen by a game developer and someone in games media. I know some of you are tempted to say, “it didn’t do everything right, because it didn’t do X”, but I kept the original title. What I found to be particularly noteworthy was that they...
They have an incentive to put games in front of you that they think you’ll like, so I figure it really just is tough. Their hit rate isn’t so bad for me, and what I hear about console storefronts is that the recommendations are even worse. Regardless of platform, relying on a recommendation engine to get word out about your game strikes me as a bad idea. But speaking for myself, I played 18 games that came out this year and easily left at least that many others behind just because there isn’t enough time to play through them all.
If it’s anything at all like the recommendation algorithm that Netflix popularized, it’s that they have tags in common (maybe even as simple as “online multiplayer” if they set a threshold on some value too low) and that people who played one had a decent enough overlap with people who played the other.
They’re also one of the few studios out there that can manage California salaries, remain a multi-project studio, and not scale up so fast that they’re trying to build games they can’t afford to make.
People see Avowed and wish it was Elder Scrolls, or they see Outer Worlds 2 and wish it was bigger or something. I’m not really sure why these people come away with the criticisms they do, but in my opinion, Obsidian made two of the best games this year, and those games were rated in the low 80s on average on Open Critic.
My experience was my experience. I’m glad for that person that they found that build. I did not, and I’ll wager most others didn’t either. The last third of my game was spent pumping points into defense and vitality to alleviate the issue, but it was a drop in the bucket. This is like when I vented frustrations with RE2 remake’s scaling difficulty, and someone pulled up, “Well, speedrunners don’t run into this issue, because…” I’m not a speedrunner. I’m a guy playing the game for the first time, and I used the information in front of me to make the best choices I could, and I still came away with criticisms. In CO:E33, it led to situations where the damage was so high and the action economy so constrained that it was faster to throw the fight and reload than it was to take a hit on the first turn and recover from it, and that sucked.
I beat the game on normal difficulty. Believe it or not, you can be good a thing and still dislike it. And I like the game, for the record, but my criticisms of how much weight they give to certain parts of the combat, which changed somewhere around the back half of act 2, mind you, hampered my desire to do more of it in act 3.
If whenever a game says “this is how you play the game” and your response to that is “it shouldn’t be”
That response is what a critique is. Metroid Prime 4 says, “you play the game by collecting these green crystals,” and many critics said, “it shouldn’t be.”
No, it doesn’t. My problem is that missing a parry, on an animation I haven’t seen before and haven’t been able to learn the tells of yet, which are purposely full of misdirection to make it tricky, was overly punishing during the learning process. Succinctly, it’s that there’s not enough fault tolerance later in the game. The parries feel great. The road up to learning the timings was frustrating the further into the game I went.
This is misplacing cause and effect. The shift to digital has been happening for years now. They cut physical production because fewer people were buying it.
There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood’s crying about the implosion of its industry, but they’ve operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.
The funny thing about Disney, and believe me, I don’t want to defend them here, is that they’ve found ways to admit and fit far more people into the park as demand rose for a thing that inherently has fixed supply. More or less the same thing is happening with GPUs and memory right now as AI demand is sucking up so much supply and they can’t be produced any faster. The supply can’t increase, so the prices go up. They have to. Nintendo and Sony both know they stand to make more money after the fact if they sell you a cheaper console, but they can’t lose $200 per unit either, or there’s very little chance they make a profit on it ever.
Insider information of what? Increases for memory and GPUs are covered by basically every news outlet that covers tech right now. That $7 to copy a file is exactly why they’d want to get a Switch into your home for cheaper if they could. You get multiple Switches in the same home by making it accessibly priced, and Nintendo knows that. Walled gardens suck, and that’s where their money is made. Right now, Nintendo is absorbing some extra costs above and beyond where they expected (like tariffs) by charging more for accessories rather than raising the price of the base unit, but there’s a good chance they lose their stomach for keeping the Switch 2 price where it is as we run into more of these supply issues.
As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.
Even ignoring the fact that cars and parking them is about the least efficient use of land you can have, the only alternative is that they keep prices low but then there’s a lottery or a waiting list to get in. No secret as to why prices just went up.
We all want things to cost less, but as adults, there are realities to acknowledge as to why they can’t. I never said they’re not making profit on their hardware, but their actions (announcing prices and then raising them above their competitors after tariffs were revealed) indicate that their margins are probably not very high; marketing one price and then changing it is a tangible expense that companies don’t like to do if they don’t have to. This report that we’re commenting on shows that even being the only new console this year is not enough to make it a hot holiday item.
There’s an enormous jump in quality of story, presentation, and quest design between D:OS2 and BG3, and the RPG mechanics are very different. It’s worth a shot, seriously.
I played through this series for the first time in the past couple of years, and I had no idea about this line, so I got to experience it fresh like everyone did in the early 00s. Absolutely amazing.
The first Divinity was called Divine Divinity, and it was closer to Diablo than Baldur’s Gate. As per this interview, this game is going to be the same style as BG3 and the Original Sin games.
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.
Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.
I think very little about AI compared to most people, for or against, but it largely seems to me like a solution in search of a problem, and it’s very cult-like how many CEOs get on board with it so quickly despite its very public lack of actually good results. On paper, the way Vincke describes their use of it sounds fine to me, but hopefully he’s not doing something so idiotic as to mandate its usage, as is happening at workplaces for friends of mine right now.
They do say it sometimes, like Microsoft admitting defeat on this year’s Call of Duty. It’s not, “We’re going to release a mediocre product,” but when they say, “We hear you, and we’re making changes” or “we’ve made the difficult decision to…” or “we’re trying to stay agile”, that’s usually what it means. Beyond just hyping up their next product, there’s substantive information in here, like engine upgrades, expansion of the studio, reduction in production timelines, the damn genre of the video game (because that wasn’t a foregone conclusion given this series), etc.
I was just reflecting on games I’ve played in the last year, and wondering when Steam’s year-in-review thing would be happening (probably within the next week)....
Did you ever play them back in the day? I emulated old games for years before I realized how much some of them were designed to be viewed on a CRT. CRT shaders have gotten to be pretty good these days, and it does a lot for the experience for me.
Do you preorder games? angielski
What about Early Access Games?...
Did Obsidian Master the Art of the Efficient Epic? | NYT (www.nytimes.com) angielski
The Knightling Did Everything Right - It Still Struggled to Sell | Beyond the Pixels Podcast (www.youtube.com) angielski
I thought I’d share this because it captures the state of the market right now, as seen by a game developer and someone in games media. I know some of you are tempted to say, “it didn’t do everything right, because it didn’t do X”, but I kept the original title. What I found to be particularly noteworthy was that they...
Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in mountain road crash (www.nbclosangeles.com) angielski
Jason Schreier's List of the Best Video Games of 2025 (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
In no particular order:...
Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Video Game Physical Software and Hardware Sales Just Had the Worst November in the U.S. Since 1995 - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
'It's not a clone of D:OS2': 6 big takeaways from our interview with Larian after the reveal of Divinity (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with LIGHT! (www.youtube.com) angielski
It the echo that gets me.
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
What are your gaming highlights of 2025? angielski
I was just reflecting on games I’ve played in the last year, and wondering when Steam’s year-in-review thing would be happening (probably within the next week)....