Correct me if I'm wrong, but since this strike is against certain companies and not some entity that represents the entire industry like it does for movies and television, that means that other individual companies who come to an agreement can still hire these people, right? If so...imagine if we had that in movies and television.
I think they asked for that in the last strike, but I haven't seen it mentioned in this one. And some speculated it was only included for something they could drop in the eventual resolution as a form of compromise.
They showed so much of the game that I was bored before I could sift through anywhere near all of it (not to say I wouldn't enjoy the game, but I know what I'm getting with a Bethesda RPG). I'm not knocking it for having a load screen between space and landing on the planet, but because we've seen that done a handful of times in recent years, as well as expectations set up from their previous games' maps, it makes perfect sense to me to expect that to be in the game.
I wasn't expecting it to be revolutionary. I expect Bioware RPGs to be on dozens of finite maps, and I expect BGS games, other than interiors, to be seamless maps. I was expecting procedural generation to cover the difference, and I expected that if No Man's Sky could do it with maybe two dozen employees, BGS probably could too, especially given when the game went into full production. I was not, and still am not, expecting the vast majority of their planets to have something interesting on them just due to how many there are.
There are a lot of reasons to love the Mass Effect games, but even after reading the article, my answer to the question it poses is, "Yeah, tons." The things this article cites as novel are pretty much universal to video game enemy design, and I can't think of anything that any Mass Effect game invented here.
If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?
I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.
More likely that they know he's probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn't get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
Overwatch was basically the only way I could socialize with my friends for a while, even though nothing about it really spoke to me. I thought for sure the allure would wear off with my friends quickly, but they stuck with it for a long, long time, until after it became Overwatch 2, though the sentiment had turned on it before that.
I’ve also been stuck in the mentality of if I want to play a game in a series I need to play the prior games.
I do this too. I just played through Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 before starting 3, and I already know there's at least one recurring character who will show up in this new one; it's that kind of thing that makes me want to see what came before. However, if I was playing Armored Core 6 right now (which I'm not, but if I find the time, maybe I will), I won't be compelled to play the earlier games in the series. I tried Armored Core 4 back in the day, and the story is as much as "you're a mercenary; shoot stuff". Not a whole lot lost there, and that means that the sequel is more of an upgrade to the software than it is a totally different chapter in a continuing story.
For what it's worth, I'd say Bloodborne is like Dark Souls but with less variety. There are a bunch of play styles you can utilize in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but Bloodborne really only lets you use one.
We're not really headed to a subscription-based future. People like Game Pass, but it has no exclusive content. Nintendo's the only one trying to make a catalog of games exclusive to their service, but they're all retro games, and Nintendo can get bent, because we can all pirate and emulate those games better than Nintendo can rent them to us. They could get be getting some revenue from actually selling those old games to customers in the places they want to play those games, but Nintendo isn't interested in that. If this particular situation gets worse, then I might be worried. There's just too much diversity in the game industry for this to be a threat. There's no central cartel or representative group for games the way there is in movies and music to dictate those markets away from what the customer actually wants. In video games, you can switch to Xbox or, more likely, PC when Sony raises prices. PCs have gotten easier, and they've always been more open, and I think the gaming market has demonstrated that they value the openness.
The percentage of the industry that can afford to push modern graphics to their limit has only shrunk over time as the development time required to make games that taxing has increased. That's why most of what you play isn't particularly high-spec.
There is a fundamental difference in resource allocation when each client is running the simulation rather than a server, which is the difference between Quake and a fighting game.
Economies of scale aren't magic. Games are somewhat resistant to price increases in the face of inflation because we've shifted to digital distribution that you're looking to erode with the suggestion of shipping with physical media again, and you'd still have to pay well more than half of the price it would take you to buy that same media on Amazon. The storage size has grown because they've been optimizing for other factors, and I'm sure they came to the conclusion that it's more likely you'll free up space or buy storage expansions in the future after a price drop than it is that you would buy a game that ran worse or looked worse forever because they optimized more for storage space.