That is important because in some jurisdictions “preorder” has legal implications and importantly, obligations for the seller. A kickstarter does not. Not yet at least, over in Germany there’s a discussion about whether crowdfunding is just a form of taking preorders (in the legal sense), which would grant customers the same legal protections then.
No meaningless dev of a meaningless video game is ever worth a witch hunt. As a consumer, you have better things to do with your time. Like in this case, digging around in your nose, watching paint dry, or pouring another coffee. All quality uses of time that aren’t the waste that is getting angry at these devs.
You could cut the “2023” from that, and it’d be no less true.
I mean sure, this year’s ad-centric nature was particularly obvious, but come the fuck on, journalists/readers/whatever: Did you ever have any doubt, seriously, ANY doubt, that this is 100% ad-space? And if yes, how?! What part of this did you watch in what year that wasn’t just ad-space for publishers?
So little we know, but just based on her previous stuff I’m tentatively excited. Hope she gets to finish this and doesn’t have it ripped out beneath her.
I’m sorry, but gaming isn’t a religion. To me at least. I don’t out “faith” into developers or games.
I wait for reviews and check some videos and hey, if it looks neat I’ll buy it. If it then turns out to be crap I’ll refund it. And if the same studio or franchise has turned out disappointed or bad stuff before, I need to be more impressed by reviews before considering a purchase.
The only thing I’d buy on faith is a wedding ring for a church wedding, tbh… (And I’m not in any church , so chances are low 😛)
Wondering the same thing. From the aesthetics I was originally really excited about it, then it came out to tepid reviews and I was busy player other games at the time anyways so I completely forgot about it.
Pretty good examples for how disappointing it is, tbh aye.
If you told me both sides were different settings of baked lighting, I’d instantly believe it. Sure, the RT looks like it is the higher quality one, but it doesn’t feel like a cyberpunk game with raytracing should “pop”. Good scenes are for it when driving around at night with wet streets. That gives the proper cyberpunk feel. But that’s about the only scenario where I’ve seen it truly work magic.
Although I will say that by now the goalpost has long moved from 60 FPS and you really want to be aiming at 144 or more. That being said, without raytracing on - which is mostly disappointing anyways - there are some really high framerates achieveable by now.
As someone who personally enjoys a told story more than a lot of directionless freedom (because I get bored after a few dozen hours, so I want the game to get its thing told and then I’m ready for the next game, basically) I of course enjoyed Geralt’s directed character more, but the two are definitely incompatible at a very basic level.
And honestly, none is inherently better, though I wish studios understood more readily just how different the underlying approach is. If someone creates a defined story then give me those fully defined characters. Give me a cool story through which I learn of them. With a few surprises. Make it like a book! On the other hand, if something is freeform, then go hard the opposite way. Make it sandbox-y! Allow me to create narrative myself through what I do, don’t hold my hand and try to guide me back onto rails.
(That is, the main story was just about the part I enjoyed the least in CP2077 next to the bugs, and I really don’t think V’s character fits the gameplay and what we players do in it very well. V is an interesting character, but not for an open world do-whatever-you-want game, and the game they created doesn’t fit a character that is supposed to have a specific design very well.)
As long as laws don’t constrain this rampant drive for short-term profit maximisation, and as long as laws permit the only truly valuable customer to be the shareholders and the C-suite’s own bonus programs, this won’t ever change.
Which in turn also already implies what needs to happen: Companies need to be prevented from caring more about the above two groups than the actual workers.
But this is difficult to pull off. The CEO (etc) should ultimately have the responsibility for the overall direction, but directly tieing them to the stability fo the workforce is tricky. It would be a way of doing it, of course. As in, loss of income of individual workers is directly judged against whatever payment/share program the C-suite managers enjoy, making them directly reponsible for not fostering an environment in which regular mass-layoffs are desirable.
Likewise, if shares automatically lost value whenever personel cost is cut (instead of gaining), firing workers would be heavily discouraged as it would decrease short-term profits and (correctly) flag a destabilizing event in the company.
All really tricky though, especially on an international level. But something ought to happen to keep this shit in check.
It’s FROM, they still loathe PCs on a personal level. Or at least it always feels that way. They get ordered to release on PC, and they do, but they curse them every step of the way and fuck it up as much as they can without getting fired.