I played a few hours of Palworld, and it's serving the role of a podcast or second-screen game quite well. It's still early goings, and I'm around level 10 or so, but it's doing for me what Pokemon hasn't done in decades while simultaneously combining it with aspects I really enjoy from Factorio.
I'm also coming close to the end of Pillars of Eternity, I think. I'm in the second DLC, and I hit a huge difficulty spike, as quests available around my level have seemingly started to dry up, but I ended up grinding a few bounties and got to level 14, which got me over one difficulty spike and hopefully paved the way to keep me moving.
Besides that, I picked up Tekken 8. This is the most I've enjoyed Tekken since the third game, and I also think I'm done with it. A lot of the game makes sense to me in a way that Tekken 7 didn't, and I've come to respect it more than its predecessor for that and other reasons, but I don't think it's for me as far as being a fighting game I'd like to compete in. I can see the path to improving from here, and it looks like a lot of memorization rather than application, where I just need to know what each move or string looks like to be ready to defend it, and until I reach that point, it's just a lot of frustration. So instead, I choose to avoid that frustration and go back to fighters that I enjoy more. It's a lot of fun at a casual level and in single player mode though.
Which monetization scheme is that? It's not like Starfield, Hi-Fi Rush, or Psychonauts 2 had microtransactions, and those are just some of the games that actually had time to cook after Microsoft bought them. For how they've managed Halo and Gears, I don't believe microtransactions made their way into the campaigns, unlike an Assassin's Creed. I'm not sure I see the association here.
By every metric we know of, they're very far from achieving it. Even with some of the largest companies by market cap now in their ownership, they're still nowhere close to owning the breadth of games that get made. Palworld still sold more copies on Steam than there were Game Pass subscribers who tried the game out as part of their subscription. Growth for Game Pass has slowed dramatically to something in the ballpark of a plateau, and subscription services for games only accounted for 10% of spending. This was two weeks ago that Matt Piscatella of Circana said that the idea that subscription services would take over gaming is unsupported by the data.
I don't have a subscription to it either. Their games aren't exclusive to Game Pass, and you can still buy them a la carte. In fact, my point with Palworld is that many more people still opt to even though the intuitive answer is that it's cheaper to rent the game for one month than it is to buy it outright, but I think people have a pretty firm grasp at the value you're giving up to not own it outright. It was a long con to get people to buy games from the Windows Store too, and people rejected it. They can't squeeze blood from a stone if the market doesn't want something. The online subscription service that is doing the nasty stuff that you're afraid of is Nintendo's; there are games there only available via subscription. Not to say you're wrong for where you draw the line in the sand on what you will or will not buy, but nothing indicates we're anywhere close to that doomsday scenario.
You know how in the early 2000s, a lot of PC games got sequels on consoles, and players complained that they removed complexity from the game to make it work on consoles? This feels like that. I don't see anything here about quests, skills, character sheets, or different ways to solve problems depending on your character's...
Perhaps, but the devs have now said that offline single player mode is a feature coming "soon after launch", which says to me that perhaps it's more coupled to a server than just a bit of telemetry, or they'd be far more reactive to the public response about the online requirement. Not to say that I know for sure; it's just a gut feeling.
Square Enix will release the original Dragon Quest Builders for PC via Steam on February 13 for $27.99, the company announced. Users who already own Dragon Quest Builders 2 on Steam will be able to…
The IP they bought was largely neglected in the first place, so I'm not sure there's much of a market for it. More likely they cast a large net with the properties they own, and the winners are the ones that survive the current economic conditions.
Cyberpunk 2077 had the expectations of the Witcher 3 that a Deus Ex never had a prayer of catching, because at a macro level, those two games are not structured the same despite the shared DNA. Embracer probably doesn't see it as a safe bet, because it's not a safe bet in the current economic climate. Tomb Raider probably is. Gunfire Games is probably plenty safe in the wake of Remnant II, and I'm sure the developers of Titan Quest II, Alone in the Dark, Outcast: A New Beginning, and Tempest Rising are all hoping that fans of those genres are as hungry for the games they're making as possible, because it will likely take a Remnant-sized success to keep them safe from layoffs. In the meantime, they seem to be spared, because it's all hands on deck to make those games great before they release.
Some day my Marvel fatigue will have worn off, and I'll be in the mood for it. If it's still for sale, I'll buy it. If not, maybe I'll pirate it. I'm glad they made a good game; it just wasn't a game I was looking for when it came out, and I don't think I'm alone. If you want to see this cycle happen again in real time, keep an eye on Suicide Squad over the next few weeks.
Oh, sorry, I meant the Avengers cycle, since that article I linked was about a combined loss between the two games, but really...Avengers was the more expensive game and did the brand damage. Suicide Squad will be that again, even though WB had several years to see this coming.
Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren't that profitable?
It always struck me as Moneyball. That yes, the big publishers were leaving a ton of money on the table by not catering to customers that are there but have been long abandoned in favor of the true goliaths like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. The way the big publishers used to operate was by making a lot of bets and then building on what worked while making other new bets. Instead, AAA portfolios went from dozens of games per year down to single digits. When you make a lot of bets, some of them inevitably won't work.
Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
Yes, not mutually exclusive with the above strategy, lol.
You're going to need a better eye for asset flips. It's too easy to dilute the meaning of the term if you're going to start including the likes of Palworld.
Still trying to finish Pillars of Eternity. The level scaling is all sorts of weird with the White March content. The game's original level cap was 12, I think, and I'm there now, close to 13. Since both your to-hit chance and all of your defense stats are significantly affected by leveling up, some areas are ridiculously easy, and a few areas are ridiculously hard. I can waltz through the majority of combat encounters and then end up in one where all of their magic casters immediately stun/paralyze me or knock me down for about 10 seconds straight, rendering me completely unable to defend myself, and the fight ends poorly in hardly any time at all. And what sucks is that I know it'll be a cakewalk if I come back and do this fight in like 2 levels, because enough of my party will survive the dice rolls that lead to characters being paralyzed for so long, so that I can properly respond and keep my party alive. I hope they adjusted this stuff in the sequel, which I do intend to start right after I finish this game.
I also picked up Tekken 8. I have historically not been a Tekken fan. The movement is weird, and the characters feel like they all do kind of the same thing, which takes a lot of the fun out of a fighting game where you get to select a character. At least it's a full package. I went through the arcade story mode, which is a much-needed tutorial after the complete lack of any such thing in Tekken 7. The cinematic storyline, which I haven't finished yet, seems to have gotten rid of the biggest problem with Tekken 7's story mode, which was that narrator who made the craziest anime nonsense seem boring. And as for the character stuff, the Heat system does add in a pinch of flavor that incentivizes you to do something somewhat unique with your character in order to stay in Heat mode longer; for instance, if I'm playing King, doing his powerful grab moves will extend his Heat meter, which means it's rewarding you for playing him the way he ought to be at his coolest. We'll see how that goes. Unfortunately, the online mode has been a no-go. There's a problem right now where playing the game through Proton just results in a lot of disconnects, so I've hardly been able to finish a match, and I likely won't try again until I see some patch notes acknowledging that they've fixed the issue, either on Bandai-Namco's side or Valve's side or both.
What are you talking about? Indie development studios spring up out of mistreatment at AAA studios all the time. Where do you think Supergiant, Second Dinner, and Frost Giant came from, for instance?
I think you're looking for Wasteland. They shared a lot of DNA already, and they've got different senses of humor, but Wasteland still has a black comedy angle.
As in most RPGs, having more actions was always beneficial, so I for sure always had companions in Fallout, even though they were AI controlled and often got in the way. At least Wasteland just gives you control of them.
Nah. I remain hopeful that this is a market correction against live service investment. Devs will be hurt in the interim, but think about how something like Redfall happened. The suits said they had to make a live service game at Arkane. Arkane devs had no passion for that. 70% of the studio left, leaving Redfall's development to inexperienced new hires that replaced them, and they essentially set those development funds on fire making that game that no one wanted to spend money on. Sega made Hyenas for $70M, their most expensive project to date, and decided it was better to just not release it than to continue to run infrastructure to enable it. A similar story to Hyenas over at Sony, where they cut their live service portfolio down from 12 games to 6, seeing that the well had run dry. There have been a lot of these bets made, and they've been big bets, with the assumption that they'd see all the success that their predecessors in live service games had, without realizing that there aren't enough customers out there for you to be lucky enough to capture that success from when they're busy playing other games.
So what do all of these devs make instead? Video games that people actually want to play and spend money on, that can be made with budgets they can afford.
It has been a trend that we see fewer AAA games per year, for a very long time. I think that can easily stabilize at a number of AAA games similar to what we saw last year, when we stop designing games that take up infinite time to play. Likewise, a great year for games doesn't mean that so many of them are concentrated in the AAA space. Hollow Knight Silksong, Mina the Hollower, and Penny's Big Breakaway could, potentially, all be some of the best games we've ever played, and not one of them will have come close to a $100M budget. (I don't think this year will top last year, but my point is that it doesn't require massive budgets to do so.)
Even without any cynicism, I think the government was more interested in there being tighter competition among cell carriers than they were with the people who will lose their jobs in a merger. With all due respect to those who fall on tough times as a result of that kind of merger, it's a more short term and small scale problem than there being fewer viable competitors in an important sector of the market.
You're right. TCGs with blind draw boosters are also bad. I didn't complain about Pokemon cards back in 2000 because I was a child and didn't comprehend that that was what I was doing. I definitely stopped partaking in Magic: The Gathering as an adult though when I realized it was a neverending gambling treadmill. Today I frequent fighting game locals that are kept afloat by Yu Gi Oh gambling addicts who fill the trash cans with booster wrappers as they go back to the counter over and over again to buy more packs.
Off the top of my head, there's Temtem and Cassette Beasts that try to mimic the formula more closely, and then there are a bunch of "Pokemon but _____" takes on the formula that you can find with a quick Google. This is "Pokemon but <survival game>". Last I heard, Ark didn't let you assign dinosaurs to a factory or have some of the more RPG systems like boss fights, but quite frankly, I found Ark so obtuse that I didn't play for long.
I'm a fairweather Pokemon fan at best, but I'm with you on Temtem for the same reason; many people don't have the same reservations as you and I, so I thought I'd mention it. I think Cassette Beasts is that game and reviewed well, and to ignore it might be to ignore exactly the game you're asking for, but I'd also point you toward the "creature collector" tag on Steam. I've never heard of Coromon before doing that search to leave this reply, but mousing over it for a second shows a video that proves they know what they're making (87% positive Steam reviews). Same goes for Nexomon: Extinction (92% positive). No one will know what you're looking for better than you, but people have been making games inspired by Pokemon for a long time now.
I've been playing a ton of Pillars of Eternity still. I think I can wrap up Kana's quest before I head into Act 3. I've got a lot of irons in the fire of my quest log that look like I need to advance the plot or level up more to finish them, so Act 3 is maybe when they intended for me to finish those.
I had the same reaction to God of War, with reverence for the combat in those other games you listed as well. Do you typically enjoy character action games? They all kind of felt the same to me, and I couldn't really get into the combat in them even though I ought to be into it on paper. Then Hi-Fi Rush came along and made that genre make sense to me. Now I've gone back through most of the Devil May Cry series and plan on giving God of War another shot when I find the time.
A character action game is something like God of War, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or Hi-Fi Rush. Combo-based, juggle-based, score chasers, but different than the rhythm-based combat in Batman: Arkham or Spider-Man.
This is quite an interesting “Documentary” about how internet critics can bend reality on the example of Emil, the Lead Writer of Starfield and Fallout 4.
I only heard this guy's name come up in the wake of Starfield, but none of this internet hate mob mentality is surprising. I still get flashbacks to how quickly the internet demonized and harassed Jennifer Hepler of BioWare. Internet bullying is bad regardless, but it's especially hard to know whose work you're criticizing in most video games, because they're made by large teams, and "written by" will often be credited to something like 5-10 people on a game the size of Starfield's.
I had a ton of things to critique in Starfield, including the writing, for one reason or another, and when I saw credits roll, I was looking for how many quest designers they had, because my criticism was that it felt like they were stretched so thin to make so many quests that hardly any of them could stand to be any good. Sure enough, for the hundreds of quests in that game, they only had a handful of people listed under quest design. I'm still not going to single out any of them as being bad quest designers, because I don't know who worked on which quest and if this was a product of how much content they were under pressure to design. There is one person I can point to for a different criticism I had, and that's because he proudly took credit for it specifically in an interview, but rather than bullying someone on the internet for a creative thing that they worked on, just note to yourself mentally that it was a subpar product and don't buy the next one. It's the sane response in a situation like this.
Different degrees of shaking up the formula. This is Pokemon-but-survival, and I've got another game in my backlog already that's Pokemon-but-metroidvania.
Heh, maybe I'm splitting hairs, but if you want a game "like Pokemon", they've been making exactly that game for 30 years, but there's only a handful of games in the ballpark of Bloodborne. If you want the fantasy of roaming a world, catching creatures, and battling with them, there are lots of ways to skin that cat that GameFreak and Nintendo haven't been doing that aren't at odds with preserving those core pieces. Likewise, I don't enjoy Monster Hunter, but some of its core pieces are present in the likes of Horizon and Mercenary Kings, and I love those games for taking the high level parts of Monster Hunter that do work for me.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of February 4th
Hey y’all, what have you been playing!...
Report: 95% of studios are working on or aim to release a live service game (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
[Sony PlayStation] State of Play | January 31, 2024 (www.youtube.com) angielski
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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 - Extended Gameplay Reveal (www.youtube.com) angielski
You know how in the early 2000s, a lot of PC games got sequels on consoles, and players complained that they removed complexity from the game to make it work on consoles? This feels like that. I don't see anything here about quests, skills, character sheets, or different ways to solve problems depending on your character's...
Microsoft quarterly gaming revenue up 49% following Activision purchase (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League adds Denuvo DRM before launch (www.pcgamesn.com)
Dragon Quest Builders coming to PC on February 13 (www.gematsu.com) angielski
Square Enix will release the original Dragon Quest Builders for PC via Steam on February 13 for $27.99, the company announced. Users who already own Dragon Quest Builders 2 on Steam will be able to…
Embracer Group Cancels ‘Deus Ex’ Video Game (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/WOlNl...
Are you enjoying Palworld? angielski
Sorry if this is redundant, I didn’t see another thread focused on reactions to the game itself (just the Pokemon-ripoff news cycle)....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of January 28th
What are you all playing! I’ve been playing a lot of lies of p and have been dipping my toes back into binding of Isaac!
Over 5,000 games industry workers have already lost their jobs in 2024 (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Tekken 8 Review : Why Tekken 8 is the Best Tekken Game Ever (youtu.be) angielski
CustomizationAre you ready to experience the next evolution of Tekken? In this video, I w...
How do you feel about the expression "updated for modern audiences" in remasters and remakes?
Do alarm bells ring or not?
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Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition Comes To PC This March (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
The updated version of the game will support unlocked frame rates, customizable graphics settings, and more.
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According to Kotaku: 25 Days Into 2024 And 5,800+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced (kotaku.com) angielski
this is a running tally they’re compiling in a single “article” and yeahhhh. not looking very good right now
Microsoft to lay off 1900 people across Xbox and Activision Blizzard (www.eurogamer.net)
Valve Made $1 Billion From CS Cases Last Year, Data Claims - Insider Gaming (insider-gaming.com)
Palworld’s success is partially born from Pokémon fans’ discontent (www.polygon.com) angielski
Palworld is an alternate take on Pokémon at a time when the colossal franchise feels stagnant and slow
Palworld Has Huge Weekend, Sells 5 Million and Overtakes Cyberpunk 2077 in Steam’s Most-Played Games List - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of January 21st
Hey y’all, what have you been playing?...
Lies, Hate and the story of Emil Pagliarulo (piped.video)
This is quite an interesting “Documentary” about how internet critics can bend reality on the example of Emil, the Lead Writer of Starfield and Fallout 4.
Palworld Sells Over 1 Million Copies in Just 8 Hours as Steam Servers Struggle to Cope With Launch - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Palworld has hit a big sales milestone just hours after release in what is already looking like one of the biggest video game launches of 2024.
Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial (arstechnica.com) angielski
For the uninitiated