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.
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.
I had a very strange personal interaction with one of the heads of this studio at a PAX years ago, but the story of this studio, if it ends here, appears to be that they continually bit off more than they could chew and didn’t aim to make a project that they could afford to make well.
“I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable,” Howard says. “I think it’s great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, ‘Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76’ now, and so I think that’s really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite.”
I’m sure Todd’s head canon is that there’s more of a debate than there actually is.
Just about any game is someone’s favorite, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series’ usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you’re calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven’t seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda’s entries are not among the strongest in the series.
I’ve been on gaming forums for a long time, and I honestly can’t recall a single time I saw anything resembling an actual debate that people might like 3 more than New Vegas. I have seen debates of 3 vs. 4 and New Vegas vs. 1/2, but I’ve never come across a debate between people who’ve played more or less the entire series and preferred Bethesda’s games. Maybe that’s you, but this would be the first time.
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.
No Avowed or Outer Worlds 2 either, which are high on my personal list. And before someone wants to tell me they were divisive, they both reviewed far better than the likes of To a T or Lost Records.
I would ordinarily put my top-level thoughts in the “Body” part of the link submission, but I’ve found that a lot of people here only read that box without reading the article, so I’ll put them in a comment here.
“Your company is only as strong as your last game,” says Celia Schilling, marketing director at Yacht Club.
This is true when you’re a single project studio.
By 2024, Yacht Club finally acknowledged that the two-team structure wasn’t working. It laid off some employees to cut expenses and paused development on the Shovel Knight sequel so everyone could work on Mina the Hollower, with Velasco taking over as director. What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever.
My read on this is that the the two-team structure wasn’t the problem, but scope creep was, not to mention the bad fit for initial project direction that they acknowledged elsewhere in the article. I’m quite sure Mina the Hollower will hit their sales target of 200k copies. Hopefully they scale back up responsibly after that.
They did a lot of extra work on it without charging for it, and it’s been a long time since they put out a hit. California salaries and real estate are expensive.
But lead level designer Jacob Mikkelsen says he doesn’t regret anything they’ve done so far
Not even the online requirement for accessing most of the game’s features? It’s so needless. To my knowledge, the game doesn’t even have an in-game microtransaction shop to give them an incentive to have you online. At least there’s a community server project, so I feel good about our chances of preserving the game in the future, but it doesn’t make me okay with giving them my money in the present. And it’s a damn shame, because the sandbox they made for Hitman is fantastic.
I feel this way as I get older. I don’t care how “realistic” the latest iteration of Call of Battlefield 19: Looty-Shooty Palooza" is, give me compelling gameplay; Not a generic “go here, shoot that, loot this” gameplay loop.
Indie games have had a far better hit rate with me since about 2017 or so, but this year, bigger budget games have been more my speed. I agree; there’s no need to stick to those sorts of categories when your favorite can come from anywhere.
What do you consider Obsidian? They put out two bangers this year. Does Split Fiction count? They’re at least an order of magnitude under the budget of a marquis Sony game, let alone the likes of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. How about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? The Alters? Dispatch? Have you heard of a little game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? I hear people like that one. (I’m joking. I’ve played it, too. Budget estimates are still in the tens of millions of dollars.) I’m strongly of the opinion that AA is back right now.
I would call Avowed the best action game this year, yes. I think a lot of people were let down by the ways that it’s light on RPG systems, expecting it to be a Bethesda style game, but I’d say that, while it’s not 1:1, that game has a lot in common with FromSoft games but without the tense feeling of being against tough odds. If you haven’t played it yet, you’ll see what I mean. There’s also Eternal Strands, which I haven’t played just because there was so much else to play this year, but it’s got some buzz and interesting design ideas behind it.
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
Wreckreation maker Three Fields Entertainment puts whole studio on redundancy notice (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
I had a very strange personal interaction with one of the heads of this studio at a PAX years ago, but the story of this studio, if it ends here, appears to be that they continually bit off more than they could chew and didn’t aim to make a project that they could afford to make well.
'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
The best games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff (www.npr.org) angielski
Marathon Art Controversy Resolved As Artist Reaches Agreement With Bungie And Sony (thegamepost.com) angielski
Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Yacht Club Games needs its next title, Mina the Hollower, to be a success.
LET IT DIE offline version announced (www.gematsu.com) angielski
As ‘Hitman’ Turns 25, IO Interactive CEO Talks Eminem-Slim Shady Collab, ‘007 First Light’ Inspiration and Future of the Video Game Franchise: ‘Of Course There’s Going to Be’ a ‘Hitman 4’ (variety.com) angielski
Palworld dev isn’t impressed by "so-called" AAA, prefers indies since they "include the kind of systems you can’t find in other games" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
I feel this way as I get older. I don’t care how “realistic” the latest iteration of Call of Battlefield 19: Looty-Shooty Palooza" is, give me compelling gameplay; Not a generic “go here, shoot that, loot this” gameplay loop.