Don’t worry Geoff, when it comes to AAA games, my expectations are already at rock-bottom. I expect almost every single AAA game to have some kind of catch be it microtransactions, or live service, or some shitty launcher requirement, etc.
This. People paying hundreds for a skin in CS and hundred for a new game mode that they might not even get into are the reason things we get games like Suicide Squad.
Problem is that Dragon’s dogma 2’a save system is pretty unpredictable. It’s autosave can be too aggressive where when you load a last save you might not be able to get out of a bad situation and Last Inn save might be from hours past so you can lose hours of progress, which can severely hamper the exploration. I feel like Inn save must instead be a Camp save, which would have been best of the both worlds.
The CEOs of these investor funded companies have forgotten that investors are not their customers, gamers are. This will hurt them in the long run because they are pissing off their customer base, people who really given them money to appease their shareholders. It never ends well for the companies.
Embracer thinks that by buying studios, it could somehow magically make money. Embracer has no sense of the gaming market or who to sell what games? It has no sense about what projects to greenlight or not. It had already failed once, and it will fail again, most probably.
This. AIs are basically garbage in, garbage out systems. More general an AI system harder it will be tailor to a specific game. That means companies will need their own training data to supplement it. AI is not “plug anywhere, do anything” type of a solution.
All they care about is growth, at any cost. Reminds me of the quote “Growth for it’s sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.” These financial growth chasing investor types have turned game production into literal cancer.
There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.
I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.