Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That’ll fix it!
I’m talking to you Hello Games (No man’s sky), just don’t mess it up with upcoming ‘Light no fire’.
What messed up NMS was overpromise to a basically criminal degree. If this were a B2B-transaction, they’d have been sued to hell and back. There’s absolutely 0 chance LNF won’t suffer exactly the same fate.
Early Access is just “release”. Only the devs openly admit ahead of time the game is buggy and unfinished, and promise - as always - to fix it up and add the missing parts.
Often they do. Sometimes they don’t.
TBH it’s ultimately nothing but a shitty buggy release, but the honesty of making that known ahead of time buys a whole lot of goodwill. It should be the default, that any publisher releasing a game that is not finished - so most AAA nowadays - marks it as Early Access, openly declaring the unfinished part.
It’s also very different from a beta version, which is usually feature and content complete (otherwise it’s generally called an alpha). Early Access versions are often very early in the development process, they’re feature-complete-ish, but never or rarely content complete, usually just starting out on that. This works exceedingly well for games that need “just more stuff”, but can miss the mark on games that need underlying systems reworked as this ires the existing playerbase and splits it.
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.