I’ll be honest, I had never even heard the name. Neither of the company, nor of any of their products. Still sucks for the employees of course, the current downturn is huge and as it accelerates and more and more investors pull out, the money the C-suites care about disappears and they panic even more about their bonuses so they fire and shutter even harder.
The made-up money that is the stock market can sadly have very real effects on employees’ livelihoods. :( But of course not on the CEOs who happily cash their 6-/7-digit base salary and then just fuck off to the next company they can drive into the ground.
Ah, I enjoyed the tour maps in the packs. Berlin is my favorite, but Shanghai is also really pretty.
Excited for the last pack to come out, and then honestly MK8 has more than enough tracks for anybody.
…
Oh this is about the actual mobile game? Damn. Wild that it’s still around, considering what a sad fart it was both in gameplay and reception. Reading up a bit on it, it apparently even ran quite well, interesting to hear that. It went completely off the radar after just a handful of months.
To me it’s less about the user reviews, and more about how as now some time is passing, listening to professional reviewers in podcasts etc, more and more the mood turns… tepid?
It’s not that anyone is underwhelmed. More just… whelmed.
Very much so, because to me it openly announces that the game is centered in its design about something between:
Microtransactions
Extrinsic motivation
FOMO
None of those are a good story, great characters, good world building or good intrinsic gameplay design. And they don’t need to be for a live service game, but it also means it’s inherently worse as a game than the same underlying idea not developed as a money squeeze service.
Feels like they got like 1% tops then. >.> It’s weird what a cheating problem this game has, especially with the tag-along thing where only one person cheats but others who do not cheat intentionally group with them to farm wins.
I mean sure, two outlets reporting it, but I’ll believe it when I see it. With the Switch Pro/2/U/360/Series N in particular, the leaks were always so outlandish and in the end turned out false, while we can clearly assume the overall news about a Switch successor being in development to be real, any specific piece of news I’d immediately discard and put into the “made up stuff”-folder for the time being.
It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.
Would branching out into spectacle brawlers work for you?
In that case, check out Bayonetta 3 on the Switch and Armored Core VI on PC/whatever!
For something closer in combat feel to Elden Ring, Atlas Fallen maybe? But I haven’t personally played it and reviews are mixed, so can’t really say how enjoyable that would be.
The problem is more that generative AI is trained on the actual work done by other, actual people. And we have no legal framework so far how those people should get paid in turn.
Plus, let’s not for a moment imagine that Sweeney is saying this out of a firmly held personal belief. He’s entirely based on his reactionary stance to Steam. Steam goes against generative AI -> Sweeney is in favor of it. If Steam would say they’re against eating live babies, you can sure as hell bet he’d sing praises for that, too.
At this point it feels like Tim Sweeney is a generative AI which has been exclusively trained on taking a data set from Steam’s and Gabe’s decisions and inverting them. And that’s it.
The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.
And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a “I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it”. It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.