why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?
Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I’d call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what’s ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don’t agree but also aren’t in a position to refute it.
They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.
I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.
I played it on Xbox and then PC even back in the day, and I’d 100% believe that it’s poorly optimized; they patched it a few months after launch to remove a lot of extraneous, unseen detail on the map that was hurting performance. It’s still surprising if you can’t run a 10 year old game well on a modest modern PC.
Unity was the best in my opinion. Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all the new design of Assassin’s Creed games that earned their own set of fans, but they’re so different from what came before with their faux RPG design. The fantasy is broken for me when I sneak up behind someone, stab them in the neck, and their health bar only goes down a little bit.
The first Assassin’s Creed game was very repetitive, but they gave you small assassination missions for you to figure out how to get, kill your target, and get out. The next several games in the series were better in every way except for perhaps these missions that mattered most, which they made extremely linear and scripted action missions.
Unity (set in Paris in the late 1700s) was an answer to those frustrations. There was a point in the dialogue where they specifically called it out. “So what’s the plan?” “The plan? Come up with your own plan. I’m not here to hold your hand.” They gave you expansive areas to carry out your mission, and you could find your own way in, kill your target, and get out. The game has some of its own baggage, like the loot system taking any challenge out of the combat later in the game, when the whole idea was that you were squishy that you should avoid combat, but it delivered on the experience the best since the first game.
Then Syndicate came out next, and they highlighted different ways to do your assassination like you were a big dummy, and they made a significant part of the game about street brawling, so I gave it a hard pass. The next game in the series was Origins, which brings us to the modern faux RPG era.
When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.
Yeah, I think the strategy is so terrible that they can’t believe it, but they’ve publicly stated that’s the goal. I’m not sure what data they’d get out of it that they don’t get out of Steam achievements, but more likely it’s to brag about how many “active PSN users” they have, using a misleading number. Still, all I see when I see that requirement is online DRM.
It was faster to load the higher resolution data back in the early 2010s on HDDs, so I don’t imagine it got any better for using compression now that we’re on SSDs.
Starting with this one, it’s a requirement on PC, yes. Hopefully they do away with it due to lost sales, but they’re still at least pretending that they’re somehow going to convert PC players into console players.
Nah, that’s not some inherent quality you have. I played fighting games regularly for basically my entire life, but it was only about 5 years ago that I started to really learn how they work under the hood and focused on how to improve. You can too! Also, “learning how to get good” is a skill that transcends any one genre, so I recommend you try it on one game or another.