As most of you know, HL3 is pretty much the most popular “vaporware” game out there. Something always rumored and in development, but never heard again after a certain point....
We know the answers to this. First, we got Half-Life: Alyx, which is a phenomenal Half-Life game that happens to be a VR game. Slight spoilers, but to say that Half-Life 3 is promised at the end of that game is an understatement.
Second, if you’ve already played Alyx, Keighley put out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, which has a full timeline of everything they worked on since Portal 2, including cancelled games. One of those games was Half-Life 3. It would have been a game with procedurally generated levels interspersed with static set pieces, which sounds similar to a single player version of that game The Crossing they were working on. If you ask me, that design makes plenty of sense for putting a bow on a series with a time- and space-hopping protagonist in a series that always ends with cliffhangers. It didn’t come together though, so it got cancelled.
Alyx was put together in part because letting all of their employees dictate their own projects was not getting the same results that it used to, so there was a bit more direction with the project than Valve had had in the years prior.
The roster they launched with was pretty robust even without him. Personally, after how shoto-heavy past rosters have been, I hope Akuma is the last one, unless they add Dan years from now.
Judging by how Sony is doing even though they clearly “won” with the PS5, it looks like consoles as we know them are not long for this world, and that seems to be the idea Microsoft is pivoting around.
For those who missed it, Embracer is split into three new publicly-traded companies, Asmodee Group (focused on board games) and two tentatively-named groups comprising their video game business. Wingefors, the CEO, and still (I believe) majority share holder of these three new companies, doesn’t do many interviews....
It sucks that I don’t trust this game to be playable offline. I’m also not a fan of hitstun decay, but at least there were a few points in this video where there appeared to be tech traps; if you’re going to have hitstun decay, it needs to keep the other player engaged too, rather than just holding a button and waiting for your opponent to maybe screw up.
In the Paradox case, nothing is live, and they aren’t pretending it’s a service. They just put goods out at a rapid clip that you choose to buy or not. That’s why live service games are always online. If Paradox counts, then so do board games, and that’s absurd.
Just like the UK variant, this is an official government petition to look into the issue. Unlike the UK variant, the only signature threshold is 50 signatures - that said, more is better in this case....
I think your last paragraph highlights exactly how I figured it would work. If you couldn’t provide the servers when you ran out of money, it would show you weren’t complying with the law when you built it. Remember, online multiplayer games existed for a long time without requiring the use of company servers. The Game Awards’ multiplayer game of the year last year is playable via direct IP connection and LAN. Nightingale requires a connection to official servers and was slammed in reviews for not offering the ability for customers to run them themselves like most of Nightingale’s competitors do.
Great. It should come at great risk to build a product for customers that’s designed to self-destruct. It reduces the number of multiplayer games that we’ll be able to play in a decade. Even bad games should be playable indefinitely, but plenty of these are very good games that simply go through the natural ebb and flow of popularity. The solution is to allow me to host the server, connect to a host directly via IP, play over LAN (which means VPNs work too), etc. If you haven’t seen the Accursed Farms video, the root of this campaign, you should watch that. He sets the bar pretty low just so we have the absolute minimum. The go-to example for this is The Crew for the purposes of this campaign.
And honestly, I’m pretty regularly on the side of free market, let people do what they want with their money, but even if this didn’t bother me because of what this means for preserving the history of an art form, it’s become extraordinarily difficult for me, the consumer, to even know what I’m buying. Games with online requirements often hide it in fine print italics in the Steam page; in the case of games like Palworld, that disclaimer is actually wrong, and you can play offline just fine. Games with LAN often don’t advertise it on the list of features, and I have to either ask an existing owner of the game about it or hope the developer answers my question in the Steam forums. We need consumer protections for this stuff codified into law.
My second paragraph is mostly solved by the first paragraph. If every game lives forever, guaranteed by law, then I hardly have to care, but mostly I was stressing that there’s not even a free market solution to this problem. The point of this campaign is to give us these rights, because it’s truly stupid that we’ve gotten away without having them. Perhaps with the right legal challenge in the right country, it will be seen to already violate some consumer protection law currently on the books. That’s one of the things we’re hoping for, and this campaign is our best shot. I’d strongly encourage you to follow whatever steps on the web site you’re able to based on where you live and/or whether or not you own a copy of The Crew.
INSIDE INFORMATION: The Board of Directors of Embracer Group AB (“Embracer Group”) today announces a transformative step for value creation through a separation of the group into three market-leading games and entertainment companies: Asmodee Group, “Coffee Stain & Friends”[1] and “Middle-earth Enterprises &...
I believe you can get a refund all the way until two weeks after 1.0, so we kind of still do. But also, I can’t think of any game beta that took iterative feedback to core systems the way today’s early access games do. Perhaps because more games are very systems-driven today by comparison.
That doesn’t make it sheer greed; it’s what’s feasible to develop. A systems driven game like a city builder or a 4X game mean that you can’t just drag and drop old content in the new systems and expect it to work and look cohesive. Every fighting game launches with fewer characters than the previous version, and it’s not because it’s some conspiracy to delay dropping the SFV characters in SF6; it’s because swapping out the V system for the Drive system is a massive change, and the old characters take a lot of work to port over. Even the art style in Civ 6 is very different from Civ V. When you try to just copy and paste content between two different styles of art direction, you end up with nightmare fuel Chun-Li in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite.
Sure, but that was iterative, like Super Street Fighter II Turbo, as opposed to making Street Fighter III. Wherever they go with Smash from here, it will involve a systems rework and fewer characters.
No, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Everyone ran out of cash in this industry. Investment dried up, and they knew what state their game was shipping in. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be upset as a consumer either.
And perhaps that health is because by that point they already started releasing multiple games far too early for a cash injection, one of which ended with them cutting Harebrained Schemes loose. I’m also calling it like it is. I don’t see healthy companies sacrifice their long term fan base and development throughput for short term gains. It smells a whole lot like trying to stop the bleeding. As for assigning The Chinese Room to sequel a beloved RPG, I don’t even know where to start there.
The ways that they play differently are a few numbers tweaks and occasionally a new animation. It’s not the difference between Melee and Brawl or 64 and Melee.
You don’t see Take Two shoving GTA6 and Judas out the door for profits now, for instance. Paradox abiding by the same MO to burn good will for multiple games and then getting developers off their books is a move you make when you’re out of better options.
Correct. We’ve seen tons of layoffs in this industry because their business models weren’t healthy. So they’ll make cuts, or push out games like Cities: Skylines II or Skull and Bones when they’re not ready or will do long-term damage to their brand because they need to take the least bad option, but meanwhile, Take Two and Nintendo can push back marquis products another few quarters because they’ve got a moat of security around themselves. At times, those companies were not, and one day will not be, healthy, but then they sacrificed or will sacrifice something or other in order to survive to be healthy another day.
I’d say it’s a sign of an unhealthy company, since their reports must be truthful but can present the rosiest picture possible. You don’t have to force this to be some absolutism. The rest of the industry came on hard times simultaneously to these games releasing unfinished, as well as games from their peers doing the same. I don’t think my conclusion is farfetched.
You’re looking for an argument that I’m not interested in, and it’s not what this conversation was about. Paradox sure looks like it released some games early, knowing that they were underbaked, because they couldn’t feasibly keep delaying them to give them the time they needed. We can agree to disagree there and go our separate ways.
There was an article from years back, I want to say around 2019 or so on then-Gamasutra, about how it was already too late to stop the bubble from bursting because all of these games are trying to get everyone’s attention (I’m having trouble finding it now). Now the bubble is bursting, and big games these days have dev cycles of about 5 years, putting us right here in 2024. Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product. Maybe sequel it or otherwise make regular old expansion DLC. That was sustainable. No one even makes a multiplayer game anymore unless it’s intended to be rigorously competitively balanced or suck up all of your time and money through grinding.
The industry kept making games bigger that would have been better off if they’d stayed smaller. I’m not saying to make the games they make now in less time. I’m saying stop making games that take 5 years to make and instead make games that take 3 years to make.
And what you’re describing is the economic realities of a bubble bursting, which means they have to pivot to making something sustainable that the market actually wants. That doesn’t mean AA or indie exclusively. It does mean smaller scope. Halo and Gears of War could be created much faster when they were linear games, and now they’re both open world and arguably worse off for it.
What specifically didn’t you like about 3? I haven’t played any of them, but we’ve had a drought of crime stories in games lately, so I’m looking forward to seeing another one come out (that isn’t Yakuza).
I just filled out my report to the DGCCRF, and I hope it’s even more damning, amidst my claims of forced obsolescence, that the game was removed from my account in the past week with a message telling me to check the store for new games to buy.
I’m not sure about anyone else, but I found there to be a lot of homogeneity here. The games that were the most up my alley were the ones I’d already heard of, but there were a lot of Vampire Survivors-inspired games and city builders.
And what’s to stop this game from dying all over again? There’s still no way to run the game server yourself, right? Why do the work if they’re not going to future proof it against an outcome they couldn’t avoid the last time?
So the thing is, regardless of current campaigns to stop killing games, this is like the definition of throwing good money after bad…unless they actually offered customers assurances that they’ll get their money’s worth out of an up front payment to play the game. Because without that assurance, however long your free to play multiplayer game sustained an audience, the version where you have to buy the game up front will be worse off.
He looks really cool. Unfortunately, this game needs some big system changes that I hope, but don’t expect, they’ll make some day. The way burst works, in particular, would be at the top at the list, and as long as there are good universal defensive options, more kameos can have ambush assists (the ones that can be done at any time), which would really open up the freedom of the game, where MK1 is at its best.
Half Life 3 angielski
As most of you know, HL3 is pretty much the most popular “vaporware” game out there. Something always rumored and in development, but never heard again after a certain point....
Final Fantasy Maker Square Enix Takes $140 Million Hit in ‘Content Abandonment Losses’ as It Revises Game Pipeline - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
One big project or multiple smallers ones? What do you think?
Street Fighter 6 - Akuma Gameplay Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
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Lars Wingefors on why Embracer is going away, and what happens next [gamesindustry.biz] (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
For those who missed it, Embracer is split into three new publicly-traded companies, Asmodee Group (focused on board games) and two tentatively-named groups comprising their video game business. Wingefors, the CEO, and still (I believe) majority share holder of these three new companies, doesn’t do many interviews....
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I just want to play my game... angielski
Apparently the Ubisoft servers are down so I cannot play SINGLE PLAYER Breakpoint....
The "Stop Killing Games" Australian Petition is Live (www.aph.gov.au) angielski
Just like the UK variant, this is an official government petition to look into the issue. Unlike the UK variant, the only signature threshold is 50 signatures - that said, more is better in this case....
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Rockstar didn’t even acknowledge GTA IV’s tenth anniversary. Only by removing several songs from its radio stations....
Embracer Group announces its intention to transform into three standalone publicly listed entities at Nasdaq Stockholm - Embracer Group (embracer.com) angielski
INSIDE INFORMATION: The Board of Directors of Embracer Group AB (“Embracer Group”) today announces a transformative step for value creation through a separation of the group into three market-leading games and entertainment companies: Asmodee Group, “Coffee Stain & Friends”[1] and “Middle-earth Enterprises &...
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TL;DR:...
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Could it be? Could the game really release soon?
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