More and more lately, but not exclusively. I have an increasingly long list of things that are deal-breakers for me, and I haven’t run out of stuff to play.
Personally, I think I’d rather not even give them the word of mouth of having played their game. There’s so much out there to play, and plenty of it doesn’t come from a company doing lousy stuff like this, even if it’s second hand.
Not all digital games. If they’re DRM free, and if the multiplayer allows for LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc; then they’re built to last, arguably better so than physical media.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk’s original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.
It’s funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we’ve had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn’t launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it’s still one of the best of those.
Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I’ll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you’d eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren’t going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it’s anyone’s guess.
You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I’d be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here’s hoping. I’ll bet it happens, even if it isn’t the BG3 competitor version.