Listen, if AI was replacing executives instead of hardworking creative types, I’d be all for it.
Christ, with how limited the brainpower of your average c-suite is, you wouldn’t need “AI”. I could probably replace most of them with an excel spreadsheet.
What the fuck are you on about? They’re talking about using AI to replace the incredibly talented human labour at studios they own. Y’know, like the people who made Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, the new Tomb Raider titles, Metro Exodus…
Embracer are shit, but what makes them shit is that they’re fucking murdering a lot of genuinely talented studios that produce great work.
Embracer, functionally speaking, have zero understanding of how game dev works. The whole thing is just a massive investment fund. Basically a bunch of rich assholes who bought up every small developer they could get their hands on and then tried to MBA all the numbers up by cutting headcounts and doing other useless metrics driven bullshit. Then when this failed to produce meteoric returns on investment they all went surprised pikachu face.
In order to buy out Paradox, EA would have to make an offer for their entire existing share float, which would then have to be accepted by the shareholders. This means that they would almost certainly sell their stock at over market value (because why would they accept less?).
From their point of view, this would be a good thing. So why then would the shareholders allow this project to be cancelled if it was about to net them a huge payout, according to your theory?
Oh, sure, there’s basically zero chance that this will actually be good. But that wasn’t my point. All I’m saying is that the idea of releasing an Overwatch style hero shooter right now isn’t inherently stupid.
Counterpoint, people love Overwatch, they hate what Blizzard did to it. There’s an audience out there hungry for this exact product if someone can do it right (or, at least, about 20% less wrong than Blizzard).
New System Shock probably isn’t happening. Warren Spector was working on it a while back, but the project got canned and the rights are with TenCent now. Since it’s not exactly the sort of thing you can turn into a live service micro transaction generator I really don’t see it going anywhere any time soon.
There’s a lot I could list here, but I’ll focus on a few that I’ve played recently, that don’t seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There’s not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There’s really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It’s super cheap, it’s super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you’re telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don’t actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated “city” (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age… And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You’re a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 (“The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia”), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say “solve crimes” I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There’s no Arkham “Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues” going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it’s all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you’re the brains. It’s on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I’m slightly scared of the people who made it.
+1 for Insurgency. It’s more “mid shelf” than “indie”, but either way it’s an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they’re not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they’re in. No one ever yells “Allah akbar” or whatever.
Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it’s hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it’s still on Aspyr that they used someone’s work without permission. There’s no real justification for that, even if you’re in a bind.
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.