I mean I love Kena, but it’s more a game comparable to other classical action-adventures such as the Zelda games, not Dark Souls as it places very little focus on accurate dodging and judging when not to dodge, plus it has no gameplay loop built around repeated death.
That’s assuming the person paying and the person receiving the input are the same people. Which in larger companies they most certainly are not.
Some manager or top-level “franchise designer” had the brilliant idea of asking streamers (of all utterly unsuited people!) for advise. Someone in the actual dev team then got all the input, and promptly decided that just asking a magic 8 ball would be far more useful and binned it. Sadly they did end up asking said ball, but eh, at least they ignored the streamer advise.
Let’s not pretend that the vast majority of CP2077’s side quests are not that type of C&P’ed filler crap.
They are.
What is significant about CP2077 is how a dozen or so side quests are incredibly stellar, far outdoing even the main (non-expansion) story quest. They’re incredibly good. That’s just a few ones sadly, but they’re big and have lots of interactions and cool moments though, they almost feel like the main quests in a lot of ways.
I would guess the latter. That’s 10 guides a day. An even somewhat useful guide would take 5 days alone to research and write I would estimate.
What they want is the slew of spam-AI-generated “Here’s how to obtain the third rusty shortsword in age of calamity”-“guides” where it’s 5-10 pages of always the same overly verbose prose that’s totally not done by an LLM, no no. And there’s like 4 words of content in the whole article, about something utterly menial. And these guides exist for every single of 15000 items, in every single video game. Of course they do.
Instead of having to pay for the game’s premium battle pass or unlock that new hero through dozens of hours of gameplay, Blizzard will make Venture and all future heroes available to free for all players when they launch.
Wow, Blizzard actually taking a factually negative change back. No further modifications, no further rework, just a straight rollback of something that was a bad idea to begin with. That’s really a sign of the times changing, that always felt like something that is strictly forbidden at Blizzard! 😮
The new hero Venture is so/so though, IMO. Yeah their movement ability is awesome, but that weapon is so boring. And they hype it up so much, but it is just Sigma’s primary fire, including the ability to fire around corners and all. Unavoidable with so many heroes and not nearly enough niches for all of them that things will get doubled and tripled up, but it’s still disappointing to see something copied&pasted so directly.
What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.
Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.