Yeah this seems to be something people are missing. These tests sometimes prohibit all reviewing and commenting in their NDAs (including positive ones). It’s a playtest, not a beta, review copy or pre-release.
Prey retroactively devaluaed Dishonored for me - as amazing as those were at their time, Prey showed what really could be obtained from the formula, and perfected every aspect of it.
Not even that, but usually this comes with the actual big target on your back: Being publicly traded.
Now of course, you can be publicly traded without being a big corp, and you can be a big corp that is held privately. But usually these big corpos are the ones that are on the stock market, and yes, the moment that happens everything becomes secondary to your actual responsibility: To the shareholders. Line must go up! And an easy one is to fire more workers.
Yeah the studio put out nothing but nice games. Sure, Ghostwire in particular wasn’t stellar, but it was also enjoyable and pretty well done. Evil Within was dorky, but in just the right way. Hi-Fi was phenomenal, and that alone should have seen them physically behead every single higher manager at Bethesda before they tough anyone at Tango.
But alas, apparently if it ain’t Fallout: Ghostwire or Fallout: Hi-Fi, then it doesn’t matter. Manager bonuses ain’t going to pay themselves (hrm… come to think of it, they do?), line has to go up!
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
Maybe gaming has become too bloated as a concept if no company can ever produce a product with their own money any more, instead always listening entirely to investor cash.
And yet it was one of the best gaming experiences ever, no matter the framerate and resolution.
Been a long time since fidelity was interesting to notice, tbh. Don’t get me wrong, all else being equal I’d take 165Hz and 4k over 24Hz and 720p. But all else isn’t equal. And the better game easily wins.