ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The budget for Starfield was twice that of Baldur’s Gate 3. Throwing more money at it isn’t going to do a lot if they’re allocating it poorly.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk’s original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I’ve never played a Dragon Age, and I don’t want to put words in fans’ mouths, but does this game look good to you?

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Kingdoms of Amalur was exactly what I thought of. And I liked that game. But this didn’t look like those old games.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur’s Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they’re doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as “our Baldur’s Gate 3”. In a worst case, I’d imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.

Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I’d be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here’s hoping. I’ll bet it happens, even if it isn’t the BG3 competitor version.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you’d eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren’t going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it’s anyone’s guess.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I’ll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.

It’s funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we’ve had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn’t launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it’s still one of the best of those.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I can’t even think of a mobile game in the ballpark of what this is doing, but its closest competitors are Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, which aren’t exactly known for being lookers either.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Not according to the voice over or description in the video. It’s also why they quote a Dwarf Fortress developer in the opening seconds, talking about how impressive the simulation is. Dwarf Fortress in that it’s simulating this entire city for you to mess with, but the different take being that you seem to only control one person in it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

That was the comparison they’re establishing, not that it’s a colony management game, yes. But neither is this game indicating it’s anything like the Sims; Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld would have more in common with that.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I don’t need much. Shadows of Doubt’s objective is “solve this murder”, and for this game, maybe it’s “amass a ton of money so that you can X”. Just something to propel me forward to come up with a way to achieve it, because I won’t be a baker for the sake of being a baker, probably.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Now let’s see how they screw up the multiplayer. The world could use more FPS games closer to the original Perfect Dark than what we typically get out of the genre now.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The examples of games that made a comeback were No Man’s Sky, a sandbox game missing features where, development-wise, it’s very feasible to add in missing promised features; and Cyberpunk, a game with good bones that didn’t function a lot of the time. Starfield’s problems are deeper than that, at least from my perspective.

The tech tree and leveling system is “improve by doing”, which runs into the same problems those systems always run into, which is why no one else does them anymore. It incentivizes me to get shot in combat on purpose so that I can improve my healing, and other stupid behaviors like that. So many of the quests are thoughtless fetch quests with nothing interesting along the way, and the game would actually be better with their omission than their inclusion. The endgame mechanic is an interesting one on paper, but seeing as the major quest lines only really play out one or two slightly different ways, there’s not much that’s interesting about going back to them, and you can also do all of them in a single playthrough, so there’s no need to engage in the endgame mechanic to see it. These are some of the problems that can be fixed but will likely be so costly and time consuming when there are Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to be made that I doubt it’ll ever happen.

The more fundamental flaws are that you can’t spec your character to interact with the world in wildly different ways and get clever with its systems; the universe doesn’t flow together the way that one of their terrestrial open worlds from before do, and fast travel is now mandatory; and the story walks right up to an interesting sci-fi story and stops just short of being good. To change these things sounds a lot like making an entirely different game.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The dark comedy is peppered throughout. There’s really no removing it at this point.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It’s a roguelike, so potentially even more replayable than that.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Why is it that you draw the line at season passes? Does it just mean you pick it up on sale later? Usually a DLC pipeline is the best way to keep your employees working on something productive while the tech folks are setting the ground work on the next project.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

That’s different than a season pass though, and it’s why I didn’t question the day 1 DLC, which isn’t super common these days, from what I can tell.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Capcom vs. SNK 3 is for sure going to happen in a few years. Hell yes.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Man, scratch that, reverse it. I’ll take Civ VI’s aesthetic over V any day of the week.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I think we’re too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?

Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you’re in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they’re going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they’ve given players more and more reason to play on PC.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I think what we’re seeing is that people aren’t choosing to move up a generation.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Given how much PC has grown in the same time, statistically, they are moving to PC.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The article even cites all of the similar flops prior to Suicide Squad not deterring leadership on their plan for Suicide Squad. Someone else out there is still making that same mistake. Like Bungie with Marathon, for example.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

As someone who used to like first person shooters before they all became live service games, it makes me sad too.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Forspoken and Redfall were last year.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Save files have a ton of variance. They can be as small as a few KB or they can be full save states of an entire open world. Back in the mid 00s, I had save file folders that were larger than the install directory, like The Witcher and Prey (2006).

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I wish multiplayer FPS games remembered how to do LAN and split-screen, because this otherwise looks pretty cool.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.

Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It also smells a lot like always-online DRM for a game that otherwise exists entirely offline. The previous game is available on GOG.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.

EDIT: The truth hurts, but that’s still a live service game that’s actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Approximately $200M, but you can get creative with accounting across multiple products, the way they phrased it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

If Helldivers 2 gets updated to work offline, including multiplayer, I will no longer wish for its death. I just don’t think that’s at all likely.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Remember to support games with LAN, folks.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

They’re taking some meat off the PC bone by requiring this account again after it just caused major problems for them.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

With or without covid, development times still got to be too long, and fewer games are the natural result of that.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

To be fair on the price increase thing, this is the first time in the history of video games that the cost to produce the hardware went up over time.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Well, it was insane in the middle there. Maybe it’s worse where you are, but in the US, it’s back almost to where it’s supposed to be.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

No, there hasn’t been, but there is a distinction between currently experiencing high inflation and previously experiencing high inflation in the middle of a hardware product’s life cycle.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Very few games do. So few that the ones that hold a high player base or even grow are anomalies. This one is making strange moves like being a fighting game that, at least at launch, can’t be played offline and costs $240 to stock with every character for local tournaments.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I think enough people have been exposed to enough subscription services that customers have started taking inventory of what they’re paying per month that they didn’t used to do, which means often signing up for a month and then quitting. I’m simultaneously surprised and not surprised that the access to online multiplayer only accounts for about 30% of the reason people subscribe to these things, but then those same customers doing that same accounting of their personal finances have probably done the math to realize that, long term, it’s cheaper to just play games online on PC, which is leading to consoles performing the way they’re performing lately.