Marketing isn’t cheap either. Can’t rely on word of mouth when that word is “shite”. Fixing the code would have been relatively cheap compared to fixing their reputation.
It was OK when the games were a bit smaller (and also makes more sense when played in the right order).
Going from 1 to 2 was a huge improvement, as 1 felt more like a tech demo. Then they added two more 2’s, and frankly they were the exact same.
3 was a bit shit, and lost the city charm. It doesn’t really work in the countryside.
Black Flag was massively popular at the time, because the pirate ship stuff was cool, and it also featured the least amount of Assassin’s Creed gameplay. I think the more recent games still haven’t matched that feel with any of the ship gameplay.
Unity shoehorned in multiplayer, and managed to annoy both single player fans (who don’t want multiplayer) and multiplayer fans (because there’s like 4 missions you can do in co-op).
I didn’t play Syndicate because I was bored to fucking death of AC by this point.
Origins tried turning it into a massive RPG, with levels and choices that don’t really do anything, and stopped assassinations from actually being a guaranteed kill if your stats weren’t high enough.
Odyssey did more of the same, added the boat back in, and made the whole game ridiculously big. Like, there’s good stuff in there (the Minotaur tourist trap is a favourite, along with some of the fantasy elements), but you’ve genuinely seen most of the gameplay the game has to offer before you’ve even got off Tutorial Island. It doesn’t even really get harder. There’s just more of it. It was in serious need of an editor to bring it down to about a third of the size.
I’m still so burnt out on finishing that like 3 years ago, that I’ve not played Valhalla either.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
Rare spent 18 months developing Donkey Kong Country from an initial concept to a finished game, and according to product manager Dan Owsen, 20 people worked on it in total. It cost an estimated US$1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years. The team worked 12–16-hours every day of the week.
Even though it was based on events from WW1, stolen under cinematic license for use in WW2 by Enemy at the Gates, and then subsequently stolen again by Infinity Ward.
I mean, yeah. CoD has always glorified it. Even more so in recent years as they push for multiplayer and the massive payday that came with that. The earlier games often had a “war can be bad too” bits. The Russian bit in CoD1. The nuke. “No Russian”. But otherwise it’s a Michael Bay movie in game form.
Spec Ops The Line was the only game I can think of that bucked that. Even the publishers had no idea what it was, despite the antagonist literally being called Konrad.
The higher tiers. Not sure about the top one (Premium) any more. I got it because I thought I might want to play the older games, but it turns out there’s plenty of PS4 and PS5 games to keep me going, and frankly not enough choice of PS1 and 2 games to tempt me. A more complete library would have made sense, but I’ve literally got more on my shelf than they’ve got on PS Plus Premium.
And my internet is too rubbish for me to want to stream the handful of PS3 games either. It hasn’t even got MGS4 which would be the one interesting thing that hasn’t been anywhere else.
MS is in the subscription selling business now. Their entire gaming future hinges on GamePass, and while I like the idea of games on tap (I’ve basically bought BG3 for my PS5 and nothing else in the year since I bought it, enough on PS+ to keep me going and I can barely catch up let alone keep up), I suspect the big devs that spend hundreds of millions on making AAA games are less than enthralled with the idea and if GamePass and day one “free” games win, the outcome will be more games that I’m not really interested in.
PS+ is not as good a product as GamePass, but I believe it’s healthier overall for the gaming industry.
Currently takes about 6 seconds to swap between characters. Every time. Every turn. Click, clunk, click, clunk.
Playing really thoroughly, we’re up to 60 hours, level 7, and just starting Act 2.
It’s bad design that part of Act 1 is behind the exact same prompt as the end of Act 1. I nearly missed a whole zone there, as well as an awesome weapon.