Wuthering Waves should not be surprising. It’s a game that’s popular in China. If you’re polling people from all over the world to determine a winner, the one that wins is the most popular game in China.
Clair Obscur is a good game, but I definitely like it far less than everyone else, and if I were god of video game awards, it would have gone to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II this year.
Fatal Fury winning best fighting game was the objectively correct choice when faced against an early access game and several collections.
The Alters losing out to a port of a PS1 game, even a spruced up one, for the strategy category is pretty stupid. The Alters also should have shown up in narrative and performance.
As for reveals, there’s lots to be excited for. My most anticipated game for next year is probably Invincible Vs; I have not seen Ella Mental at where I’m at in the show, and maybe she won’t show up until later seasons, but she looks like a great Storm archetype for that game.
Hundreds of people worked on that game, as many as some AAA games, and yet games like Blue Prince, from a solo developer (or very close to it?) had to compete against that?
Moby Games lists 121 people in the credits for Blue Prince and 416 for Clair Obscur. At some point, the number of people who worked on a game is nearly arbitrary once your publisher enlists a QA contractor or starts localizing to more languages. I don’t think it’s ever been murkier territory to try to classify a game as indie.
What we think of as the rise of indie gaming was when they started getting publishers to promote them. You needed one in order to be listed on XBLA back in the day.
Xbox 360 and Summer of Arcade are major pillars in bringing indie games into the spotlight around exactly that era. There may have been Darwinia and Ragdoll Kung Fu on Steam at the time, but it was the likes of Braid, Super Meat Boy, Bastion and such that really came up within the XBLA promotions.
I played quite a bit of Pocket Tanks, but there’s a huge gulf between that and the public consciousness that came up around indie games in the summers of arcade.
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren’t opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn’t guarantee success, but I believe what they’re claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
The article cites, from the developers, that the development budget for the game was under $10M, but take that with a grain of salt, because from SkillUp’s interviews with the team, getting Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox on the project was considered to be a marketing expense. Still, what they were able to do with so little is...
It’s short by JRPG standards, and if you find a deep enough sale, I’d say there’s still a good chance you’ll be into it and it’s worth a try. It’s very JRPG but also very different from others I’ve played at the same time.
What you need to do in that case is be prepared for lots of smaller games to not hit, and then eventually one will that will make up for all the experiments you did along the way. That’s how they and their peers used to operate before they all tripled down on those big hits and stopped making new IPs.
I guess that depends on where your cutoff is for AAA, but if you’re including FromSoft, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just came out this year at a similar level of budget and production value. And I know people have their issues with Unreal, but it really has raised the bar for what a “AA” might be capable of. The likes of Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, The Alters, Split Fiction, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this year (and games like The Thaumaturge last year) are all what we would have expected out of a AAA game in the not-too-distant past, most of which comes down to scope, where a lot of AAAs are arguably doing too much.
On the other hand, winning an award from this show has a tangible effect on game sales, so it’s nice when a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 can beat the mainstays like The Legend of Zelda and earn that bump for themselves.
The jury is composed of the review outlets, not the studios. It does have a bias toward larger games, because the outlets reviewing games have an incentive to more reliably cover the games that most of their audience will be interested in, but it’s not because Sony’s voting for themselves to win.
Well, you said those were the only AAA devs that weren’t making money printing skinner boxes, and we had plenty of counter examples just this year. Obsidian put out 2 or 3 games this year, depending on how you count, and it wouldn’t be crazy for them to have an announcement for a game coming next year.
Absolutely give those two games a try; they’re high on the TGA’s lists for a reason.
Larian’s next game is the teased statue that Keighley tweeted, so they’ll have something to announce tonight. The only thing they said it isn’t is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but it could be a different Divinity RPG, or a looter like the old-school Divinities, or a new Dragon Commander, or a new spin-off entirely. They’re also a multi-project studio now.
Starfield was undoubtedly inspired by Interstellar and such, which is extremely my style, but even though it had some ideas here and there, the execution was what bothered me, and that’s why I’d like to see Larian’s take on the same kind of setting.
In fact, Mat Piscatella of Circana says, “On the hardware side, PS5 saw the most extensive discounting. So, it got a big sales lift. Wouldn’t take much more away from the week than that, tbh.”
If you want to know if this YouTube channel is of any value whatsoever, click on the channel, then click on videos, and take a look at every video thumbnail and title, and you’ll have your answer. Believe me when I say that I’ll be happy if Nintendo faces financial consequences for some of the things they’ve done in the market, but all this data proves is that PS5 had a large discount and Switch 2 did not.
There’s click bait, and then there’s rage bait. Veritasium never tried to get me upset about gravity not being a force with a thumbnail of an evil Albert Einstein saying, “HE LIED”.
Does anyone know if this will have any story hooks whatsoever to Rogue Trader? Because if so, I’m compelled to play that one first, but then this becomes a scheduling problem for me.
Worth noting that, like large swaths of other parts of the industry, the Saudis now own Evo. It hasn’t changed yet, but Ronaldo ended up in Fatal Fury, so…...
It’s a larger scene than the likes of Rivals of Aether II or Virtua Fighter 5, but there’s more at play for game selection than just that. And remember that when it comes to copies sold, Mortal Kombat 1 having a bad day is still about as good as Street Fighter or Tekken having a great day.
The good: WB development studios have been limited to making games off of only WB properties for so long. Developers would come up with a pitch or a prototype, but it wasn’t allowed to be an original IP, which was bad for them and Warner Bros., since it made it harder to sell off the video game division by itself. Maybe this will give those devs more freedom.
The bad: We’re rapidly approaching that Bojack Horseman joke where there are only four companies with extremely long hyphenated names, and Netflix doesn’t seem to know what they want to do in the video game space or how to do it. They have an incentive to lock games exclusively behind subscriptions, which is what everyone was afraid Game Pass would do but Nintendo and Netflix are doing this already right now.
Their write-up a few years ago was that the old tech stack was going to be pretty limiting for them, so I think they had to do something like this one way or another if they wanted to raise the ceiling on their potential success.
A casual look down the MobyGames lists on New Vegas and Outer Worlds 2 still shows a lot of overlap, so probably. It would be weird to invite people who didn’t work on New Vegas to see the realization of a thing they didn’t work on.
Thanks! But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas, so this was definitely all a new perspective for me, lol. I also think there are a lot of people asking for a new Fallout game that haven’t tried 1 and 2, and I’d love to point more people that way when the topic comes up, or at least to the Wasteland games as a close enough proximity.
I don’t think Sawyer was “demoted”. I think he’s just on other projects. Pentiment’s entire development probably fit within Outer Worlds 2’s timeline. I don’t think Bethesda said, “invite everyone who worked on New Vegas” expecting there to be no change in staff in 15 years, but there are still plenty of people from that old project there.
He’s on Outer Worlds 2 as “Studio Design Director”, as in duties that apply to the entire studio, a studio that works on multiple projects at any given time. He was game director on Pentiment while Outer Worlds 2 was being built. I’m sure he did plenty of actual work on Outer Worlds 2 the same way that my boss helps solve problems I’m having, even though they’re also working with other teams on other projects. He probably also got started on his next main project right after Pentiment wrapped, all while helping out on Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, and Grounded 2.
its pretty much just Sawyer, out of names people might actually know
I knew very few of these people’s names before looking at the credits just now, but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. There are names on there that you probably didn’t know that worked on both projects.
You could go to Moby games and start using Ctrl+F for the names found on the other Moby games page. That’s what I did. I found like 7 or 8 in common before I stopped. That’s enough on its own for a fun reunion on the set of the TV adaptation of the thing you built 15 years ago.
Eh, I doubt it, because it didn’t seem like I was seeing too few. They came at an appropriate clip, and the second game even gives you a car to see fewer of them after the halfway point.
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.
Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?
It’s the shoestring budget and development timeline that would leave me to believe that they didn’t intend for it to be dependent on clock speeds. It’s the tabletop roots that made me feel like I got the correct encounter rate while 8 times as many would feel wrong.
I would say it’s “tedium” that sounds unappealing to me at higher encounter rates rather than “punishment”. And it’s not just my personal tastes but also what all of their peers were doing with encounter rates, including Wasteland 1 and 2, which I’m sure you know share a lineage with Fallout.
I only played about 5 hours of Wasteland 1, but in what I’m sure is a DOSBox container that it comes in via Steam, the encounter rate was once again very similar to my experience with Fallout 1 and 2 and other CRPGs. I’m glad you enjoyed the game that way, and I definitely learned that it was at all influenced by CPU speeds, but I’m still not convinced that I got an unintended encounter rate given how reliably I and others come across it that way, unless you can cite a Tim Cain video about it or something.
2025 Game Awards Results Discussion (screenrant.com) angielski
Expedition 33 coronation as expected....
Over 19,000 games have released on Steam in 2025, with nearly half seeing fewer than 10 reviews (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Order of the Sinking Star | Official Announcement Trailer | Jonathan Blow [1:31] (www.youtube.com) angielski
A Gaming Tour de Force That Is Very, Very French (www.nytimes.com) angielski
The article cites, from the developers, that the development budget for the game was under $10M, but take that with a grain of salt, because from SkillUp’s interviews with the team, getting Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox on the project was considered to be a marketing expense. Still, what they were able to do with so little is...
The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? angielski
The game awards begins roughly ~11 hours from now. what announcements are you hoping for?
PS5 is outselling Switch 2 (www.youtube.com) zxx
Interesting video on game consoles last month ago-ish.
Warhammer 40K: 'Dark Heresy's Upcoming Alpha Launches Next Week (www.belloflostsouls.net) angielski
Evo Japan and Las Vegas 2026 lineups announced (evo.gg) angielski
Worth noting that, like large swaths of other parts of the industry, the Saudis now own Evo. It hasn’t changed yet, but Ronaldo ended up in Fatal Fury, so…...
After Black Ops 7's weaker launch, Call of Duty will no longer do back-to-back releases in the same series (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros, including game developers behind Mortal Kombat, Hogwarts Legacy (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded [the reworked Splitgate 2 relaunch] (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Neath - Announcement Trailer [from Cellar Door Games, makers of Rogue Legacy] (www.youtube.com) angielski
'Huge respect to the folks at Obsidian': Todd Howard invited Obsidian devs onto Fallout season 2's set so they could see New Vegas in the flesh (www.pcgamer.com) angielski