I'm not convinced they'll ever realize the problem with their strategy. They'll keep half-assing it every couple of years and wondering why they don't have a larger gaming audience.
I finally finished Baldur's Gate 3. Loved it. I immediately started again with a Ghost Recon team, where everyone is a rogue assassin/fighter battle master build so that you can get a ton of actions, create opportunities for advantage, and then get bonus sneak attack damage. It's working really well so far, and I've done more than half of the content in Act 1 with this team, though to be fair, of course the game will be easier when I know what's coming around the corner.
I also started up System Shock, a game that sorely needed that remake and shows that the difference between what made it good back in the day and what would make it good now are basically just graphics, controls, and UI.
I played the beginning of the original release some years back and found the controls unusable, even with a mod that "fixes" them. This new game adapts the way the original basically has a console printout for everything you look at and interact with while still allowing it to control like a modern first person video game. I'm not very far in it yet. Only about an hour. But it's one of those games where you're scouring for resources and navigating a map with keycards and turning the power back on and such, and it does all that well so far.
Among other things, it sounds like Cyberpunk had a lot of technical debt that they struggled to overcome, hence the move to Unreal engine going forward. With the lessons learned from the last one, they're surely on to bigger and better things with the sequel, maybe even the multiplayer they cut from 2077. I think Baldur's Gate 3 has shown how much hunger there is for a proper co-op mode in an RPG.
Indie game developers have it way better than indie movie makers. They have better platforms for distribution...
It kills me that there's no Steam or GOG for TV and movies. My options are either Blu Rays, when they exist, or streaming, even if I buy the movie outright.
Studios actually got tired of doing this, because rehiring is expensive, and ended up on a post launch DLC pipeline to get closer to keeping everyone working.
It's not close enough if I want to run it from a PC or Steam Deck. They only allow it on mobile where they can enforce their DRM. Then those downloads are only good for a few days before they need to be renewed and they run into all sorts of technical problems trying to enforce the DRM.
I'm not in games, but if/when things start to turn, it's far easier for myself and the people around me to just leave for an employer that treats us right than to try to unionize and force the current one to behave. Those are the benefits of having a job that's very much in demand though, not to mention one that can be worked from home and isn't dependent on geography, so the union isn't necessary because the employees already hold enough power. If the employer has a monopoly on your jobs, being able to unionize is a powerful tool in your toolbelt.
The Witcher 3, to me, made Bethesda games feel dated. The structure of the game is nearly identical, but when you arrive at your quest, it never plays out entirely straight forward, much like the Witcher source material. Cyberpunk does follow along those same lines, even if it never quite hit the highs that Witcher 3 did.
It's in the top ten most played games on Steam and had sold at least 5 million; even that number is two months old and doesn't include PlayStation. If I were to wager a guess, which you can often extrapolate from the number of reviews on Steam, it's much closer to 10 million, which is how many copies a typical Assassin's Creed or FIFA game will sell. Baldur's Gate 3 is mainstream.
The criticism of Red Dead had little to do with the impressive systems that they built for the world and a whole lot to do with how they took that freedom away from you in missions. There was very much a way they could have kept the linear story that plays out the same way every time without cutting to a hard fail state for using your brain. That's the part that felt dated, especially contrasted against the actual cool, innovative stuff that exists in the same video game.
I had no understanding of 5e, and there were a couple of things I didn't understand, but so much of that game, especially at the beginning, is choosing an option with a high chance of success and shoving or throwing things that most games wouldn't let you shove or throw. The way the game lets you verb any feasible noun, coupled with higher production value, is probably why this one hit. It's going to continue to make other RPGs with even higher budgets stand out as dinosaurs; not just Starfield but especially BioWare's next couple of efforts, given their Baldur's Gate lineage.
have not seen this picked up in gaming media yet, but i would assume it’s forthcoming if this is accurate (which i see no reason to believe otherwise)....
Bloodborne (PS4). Only 44.6% of players beat the first boss, Father Gascoigne
He was the second boss for me. The first one I encountered was the Cleric Beast. Then I got so fed up with the frame rate after that I swore off the game, especially since I just found it to be Dark-Souls-but-less. Still, Gascoigne was a hard fight, so it's not surprising that the first major souls-esque game on PS4 had a huge dropoff at a difficulty spike.
The one that always got me is that even predominantly multiplayer games have a very low participation rate in multiplayer. I've heard about 70/30 split from developers in most cases (and I've gotten a peak behind the curtain at a few other games where this trend continues to hold up, within a margin of error), where even if your game has a bad single player mode and focuses on multiplayer, only 30% of the player base will ever go online. I'll bet that's why these games stopped putting in achievements for "win one online multiplayer match", because it was astonishingly low. Far more people finished a single player story in Street Fighter V (which were awful) than those who went online to play multiplayer.
Yup, the sample size is out of people who've booted up the game ever. So 13% of players downloaded it, installed it, thought about playing it, and didn't get much further than the menu screen. 7% of players of Fallout: New Vegas never finished the first mission.
To be fair to your family member, a couple of missions in Cyberpunk is a couple of hours. I remember an extremely late title card in that game. That's more than a fair shake.
Avera adds another factor: consumers are buying fewer games and spending more time with select franchises, a trend likely to accelerate as the market continues to shift towards live service titles.
Well, given who the layoffs are hitting, perhaps we're done shifting that way and can start to shift back.
The author then goes on to mention game length, and yeah, I agree. Halo and Gears of War used to be 10 hour linear campaigns, and now they're open world. Assassin's Creed games used to be shy of 30 hours, and now they're over 60 hours. Baldur's Gate 3 is as long or longer than Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 put together; quite frankly, if the game was only Act 1, it would have more than enough content to justify its asking price, and it feels a lot like I just played through an entire trilogy rather than a single game.
But in a world where we assume that they achieved that, ignoring the long games without microtransactions like Baldur's Gate and Zelda, there are industry-wide effects at a macro level.
I loved 2 and Brotherhood, but 1 and Unity were the closest this series ever got to delivering on the elevator pitch, especially Unity. I tried Odyssey and had much the same experience as you, except I didn't have the patience to stick with it once I could see where the grind was headed.
Yeah, and the investigation missions in AC1 weren't great, but the assassination missions gave you the freedom to scope out a mission and do it yourself (same goes for Unity, even acknowledging in the dialogue to the player character that it's something the series has been missing), which was a thing that AC2 took away in favor of set piece boss battle moments.
Gotcha. On its face, $30 expansion content for a strategy game is pretty common though. A friend of mine also pointed out that they probably ought to have been funneling those resources toward Yakuza/Like a Dragon also, since that series has been a workhorse for them lately. Personally, their inability to keep those games at a constant level of production value is one of a few deterrents for me to dive into the series.
The last multiplayer mode for The Last of Us was designed to keep you playing long enough to not trade the game in. This one is aiming to be a game that has no ceiling on how much you play or spend. I'm not convinced we need another live service game that's inevitably going to get shut down and disappear off the face of the earth in just a few years. This definitely sucks for the people losing their livelihoods, but hopefully this is indicative of the live service model no longer making financial sense.
I'd argue Xbox Live was better than PC online from the time it rolled out in ~2003 until PC online got better in the early 2010s. I remember StarCraft II feeling like the first time a PC game actually just had matchmaking where I could hit a button and get a match.
It's also a little more functional than that though, because you just need the game to be installed to get decent loading performance. At most, the disc these days can only offer a fast initial "download" and a DRM check.
Matchmaking was a required feature because joining a match in progress that lasted for 4 hours and had different teams at the end than it did at the start was awful.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines still applies. Asking that question shows a misunderstanding of what a bubble is and also assumes that's what's happening right now is the only thing that will continue to happen into the future, rather than the ebbs and flows that come in any economic conditions. Current economic conditions are affecting a variety of industries right now, not just indie games, which the article acknowledges with regards to layoffs at big AAA studios. The market will only bear X amount of some thing, and spending is slowing, so X has to lower with it. That affects all video games right now, from Fortnite to Shadow Gambit.
What's with this focus on the word "complete"? Usually I just see it from people salty about the idea that a game ever gets DLC, but we're rarely seeing the kinds of things we saw in the late 00s and early 2010s where games would have a "missing chapter" or whatever, so if something about modern games is being described by how "complete" they are, it seems like a bad descriptor to me.
I agree with that person as long as we're continuing to use the qualifier "if anything". AAA studios have thoroughly undiversified themselves and are looking for buyers from the few other companies wealthy enough to afford them, hence Activision's and Zenimax's sales to Microsoft. EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft were all looking for buyers, and it wouldn't surprise me if Take Two was as well. EA's got sports and Battlefield and little else. Square Enix has Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and little else. Ubisoft has Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and little else. On and on. They spent the last decade not making small bets on new IPs to replace these IPs once their time in the spotlight wanes. It's the very thing that Phil Spencer was talking about in that leaked e-mail about what he sees as a strength of Game Pass and a weakness of how AAAs chose to respond to the changing market.
Dot com was a bubble because you could call your company anything with a "dot com" on the end and get funding for it without a business strategy. Indie games never got that treatment.
They've got 10 games for 2023, and about half of them are either Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy (Kingdom Hearts, btw, is basically still Final Fantasy as it relates to IP). If you're making small bets to find the next big thing to replace your big franchises, you need to make a lot more of those small bets, like publishers used to do 20 years ago and like mid-sized publishers are doing now. Rumor has it they divested themselves of former Eidos studios to make themselves a more attractive purchase for Sony, which fell through but resulted in exclusivity deals like Zenimax did.
They're pivoting to free to play, so that series may have waned as well. I'm sure it's still profitable, but you don't switch to free to play, especially for what is ostensibly a single player game that doesn't rely on player counts, if everything is going well.
I think this definition gets diluted by those who would call something like a Paradox game incomplete just because there are only so many features you can build for a systems-driven game like that in a few years of development time, and they naturally expand on it over time. But out of dozens of expansions, there are people who say all of them are absolutely necessary to get the "complete" experience when realistically they'd never engage with even half of the expansion features anyway.
Compared to the business they used to with the Sims, free to play makes it much, much harder to break even. You're hoping to monetize more off of a smaller percentage of your players. 95% of people will never pay in a free to play game, and the Sims games would sell over 10 million units each, handily, plus expansions. But I know that plenty of people would pirate the expansions, so EA probably sees that as a threat that they need to lock behind an internet connection in a server-based game, and they'll likely destroy the series' profitability in the process.
Still deep in Baldur's Gate 3. I did relatively little content in Acts 1 and 2, and they still took me about 20 and 30 hours respectively. I wasn't sure if the game would run out of steam for me if I tried to do every quest that sounded interesting. Now that I'm in Act 3, I know I can end the game whenever I want, but I don't want to yet. I've spent 40 hours in Act 3 already and haven't even gone to the two major quests that I need to do yet to start wrapping things up. After I finish the quest line I'm on (hints for those who know, that will hopefully dodge spoilers: I'm about to go underwater to rescue some folks, and then I have to sabotage a thing after that), I may start wrapping things up, but we'll see.
I'm trying to make D&D happen since playing Baldur's Gate. Scheduling will be hard. I GMed one tabletop game of Cyberpunk 2020 about ten years ago, and I played in a short campaign of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, so I'm not totally new to tabletop RPGs, but I'm new to D&D. I'm going to make it happen one way or another though. I'm too deep into D&D Beyond looking up spells and level up guides at this point.
I suppose it was ambiguous from the way I phrased it, but just that $35, back in like 2014. The equivalent these days when it's not on sale appears to be $45. Probably the last time I checked in on it was 2019-ish, but I ought to get access if Squadron 42 ever happens. At this rate, assuming it does happen some day, some of the actors they performance captured will be dead by then; plenty of them were getting on in years back when they first announced the cast. It's definitely not the worst $35 I ever spent though.
That's not convoluted in the least bit, nor is it faster or easier to torrent. If you somehow found out about a show but not which service it was on, there's justwatch.com.
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It (www.macrumors.com) angielski
Cyberpunk dlc sucks. 10 side missions and like 5 story missions for 30 bucks.
That’s half the main games price… Just don’t buy it...
Unity CEO John Riccitiello 'retiring' from company weeks after pricing controversy (www.eurogamer.net)
Unity Technologies - Unity Announces Leadership Transition (investors.unity.com) angielski
John Riccitiello is out, effective immediately. Na na na na. Na na na na. Hey hey hey. Goodbye.
Baldurs Gate 3 (That's crazy commitment.) (www.vg247.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 8th
New thread!...
The gaming industry needs to become more like holywood
As games get bigger and become more cinematic (and more expensive), there will be studios that grow and grow and then make big layoffs in a lull....
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Cyberpunk's storytelling makes Starfield seem ancient - Opinion (www.eurogamer.net)
(Now former?) Telltale employee: "This is a sore subject, but I feel it necessary to add to the gaming layoff news: Telltale laid most of us off early September. Status of TWAU2, I can't say (NDA)." (twitter.com) angielski
have not seen this picked up in gaming media yet, but i would assume it’s forthcoming if this is accurate (which i see no reason to believe otherwise)....
What's the most surprising facts about a game you've gleaned by reading a game's achievement/trophy acquisition percentage? angielski
I’ll start with a few:...
What the current wave of layoffs means for the games industry (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Assassin's Creed Mirage - Review Thread
Game Information...
Cancelled Hyenas was ‘Sega’s biggest budget game ever’, it’s claimed | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Announcement of Discontinuation of Online Services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software (en-americas-support.nintendo.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/aWo6a...
Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers (kotaku.com) angielski
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Is there an indie games bubble? (roadmapmag.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 1st
Scary edition of the weekly thread 👻...
Last Epoch could be new home for Diablo 4 players after content drought - Dexerto (www.dexerto.com)
$600 Million And A Decade Later, Where Is Star Citizen? (exputer.com) angielski
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com) angielski
lol. lmao.