I can’t say I follow you. I would call it satire rather than “totally random”, but if you didn’t care for the writing, you didn’t care for the writing.
I wouldn’t categorize it that way at all. It extrapolated nationality to one’s employer and religion to the law. It was unsubtle in its views of classism and such, in a way that I appreciated, but it wasn’t just doing zany things “just because”, unless you’ve got a good example that’s slipping my mind.
Is this where we bring up the old Mega Man X Sequelitis video again? Chances are the best tutorial is the one you don’t even realize is a tutorial. There was also a trend that I first noticed around the time of Gears of War where the tutorial would not only be built into the story so that you wouldn’t feel like it was chore, but they’d also give you the opportunity to just skip it.
It’s quite nice, actually. Not all work on a game is equally worthwhile. Lots of my favorite franchises have devolved into games that grew larger to their own detriment. It doesn’t often happen that one of these types of games scales back down. And it’s not like there are zero big games that I like; Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 are both 100+ hour games that are some of my favorites of all time! But unlike a lot of big games, they actually felt like there was something interesting to see for that full runtime, whereas a lot of big games actively harm their pacing by filling it with uninteresting bloat.
But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn’t usually make; etc.
A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they’re granted though. I’m not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. “Knowing how to negotiate” can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn’t really something the developers are responsible for.
Looking through each series’ Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who’ve played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I’ve never played Dragon Age myself.
Matt Piscatella pointed out on Bluesky that a launch like this is only a function of how much inventory they made available. The Xbox One had the third most successful US launch of a console.
Nah, I loved The Outer Worlds. It gave me exactly what I wanted from the setting, it made me laugh, and it wasn’t bogged down in bloat by trying to be any bigger than it ought to have been.
That’s a lot of money for any game, let alone one that will also be launching on Game Pass and, like its progenitor, is smaller scale than other open world RPGs of this ilk.
It’s this thinking that led to Starfield and Redfall being priced at $70 and Hi-Fi Rush priced at $30.
I could bitterly rationalise it if this were the release date trailer for the next Fable and I discovered Playground Games was charging me $80
Why? Playground hasn’t even made a game in this genre before. Why do you expect that to be more worth $80 than the company that’s been making acclaimed RPGs since its inception?