I got farther than you, but felt all of those things didn't really improve or feel as fun. The weapon breaking is annoying. I feel like it's too quick.
Edit: I eventually gave up after the 'first' boss (I know you can do them any order, but water blight is generally considered the easier one to do first).
I honestly don't know how that interpretation was possible in the given context. It was mentioned in direct response to someone saying "Divinity of sin 2" and I corrected it.
Yes they do. They used to buy exclusive rights back during PS2 days but eventually both MS and Sony realized it's cheaper to just buy the studios. Sony has only a small number fewer acquisitions than Microsoft. Both companies have always bought exclusivity.
Sony and Microsoft used to pay for exclusives without buying the studios. So there's no real meat to the argument that "oh, the games were always exclusive because first party" or whatever. The consoles didn't really buy that many game studios until relatively recently in gaming history. They would pay a studio to not release on other platforms. This whole buying studios thing was just cheaper in the long run. So there's no real argument to be made about Sony just making better first party games. That's what they do now given that they own the studios. Both companies are guilty of buying out studios.
Exclusives pre-dating the PS1 was more out of lack of technology. No cross platform tech really existed. There wasn't a lot of crossover. Many platforms didn't last more than a generation or two. There wasn't even much cross over in the kind of games. If you liked fighting games, you bought a Sega over Nintendo for example. With the PlayStation, they competed against Sega first, Nintendo as more an afterthought. Xbox came in later to compete against PlayStation 2. The Nintendo 64 was just a different class, and even later, the GameCube. With Xbox and PlayStation, they had similar amounts of power and restraints (an N64 cartridge could not compete from a technical perspective against the storage of discs, plus multi-disc games could exist, not really feasible with cartridges) plus abstraction technology was more advanced and one could more easily write cross platform code. Now, you either had to pay for an exclusive or simply hope they only had the intent to target one platform (whether through preference or resource limitations). So the console wars really started to heat up after the death of Dreamcast and mainly between Sony and MS. Exclusivity wasn't via first party existed, but not to s great extent beyond their flagship games.
So, tldr, exclusivity has always been acquired via money and buying them. It's easy to say it's about developing better first party once those studios were bought outright to begin with. That's how most first party titles exist now.
Ok? But your experience doesn't change what the number one reason given is though? Sure, I don't get Pixel phone anymore either because two in a row failed on me, but I don't go around telling everyone "no one buys pixel phones because they die easily"
You don't expect that from Sony so why expect it elsewhere? Sony started this game, gamers lauded them and rewarded them for doing it. Microsoft tried to not do that, and got beat down further than they had when they tried playing that game against Sony. Gamers wanted exclusives. Microsoft is providing that. You voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party and now are surprised leopards are eating your face.
This was a forgone conclusion for awhile now. Folks are just upset because Microsoft has an exclusive that Sony gamers want to play. Boo fucking hoo. I'm pissed it came to this, but gamers did this. I'm angry about it, but I don't feel sorry for gamers as a whole about it.
I'm well aware of that. That's why I named it. They said "Divinity of Sin 2". I was asking if they meant Divinity: Original Sin 2 and if it went by a different name in other markets. I thought that was clear. I'm not sure how you got to think I was asking what it is.
It was expected to be a second release after being a Stadia exclusive. This isn't judging quality, just impact.
Edit: and let's not pretend by adding "far below" when it was in the same group. And the ranking isn't even totally based on expected sales. The asking prices and the levels aren't in order. You're misinterpreting one quote entirely incorrectly and trying assuming too much from a chart.
It's outselling is what caused Microsoft to not deny it. It originally denied it because they had a rule that games needed feature parity with both Series X and S. BG3 split screen couldn't be done on S. The massive success is what led them to relax the rule. And virtually no one saw this level of success coming from within the gaming industry, including the developers themselves.
Edit: I just realized this is being upset about Starfield.
That is totally the fault of gamers. The biggest reason given for buying a PS5 over Xbox was exclusives. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Sony started the exclusives battle and continually came out ahead. Obviously MS is going to fight. Making exclusives such an important decision in console purchases drove exclusives to be important overall. There's no sense in being upset that the industrynis literally responded to gamer's actions and stated motivations.
Except virtually everyone got it wrong still. Even the head of Larian thought it'd top out at 100k max. That's currently it's average now with it's max being more than 800% higher.
BG is a big IP, but it's never had this level of success. Look at Diablo III's release (similar IP with a long break between games). It had better advertising campaign and still kind of became noise fairly quickly. Game news sites barely covered BG3 until it hit it big.
Microsoft definitely undershot, but it was likely basing it on a lot of the aggregated news as well. It had barely any coverage prior to its official release. This is usually a sign that the game will be mediocre.
Larian is a big studio but its last expected game from its really only known IP was cancelled after being put on hold for four years (granted BG3 was also being developed during this time). It's biggest games prior to this got at least partially funded on Kickstarter (not a knock against KS, but it's not generally seen as the sign of a strong studio to exec-types).
I don't blame an executive for not seeing this coming.
Executives obviously didn't see this coming. But neither did game journalists or even gamers.
Its a mistake in hindsight, but with what everyone generally knew at the time, it was the expectation of most.
Tbf, a lot of people misjudged it, including Larian. I don't think a lot of people really believed the "choices and decisions matter" would work as well as it did. Prior to release, I read an article that talked about how it was gonna be neat that the in-game news would update based on your actions. Like, that was the noteworthy function to discuss about the game. "NPCs might talk about your actions in passing to each other".
Did Microsoft underestimate it more than others? Sure. But pretending like every corporation, including Larian, didn't underestimate it a whole lot is a bit crazy.
Edit: and isn't the game Divinity: Original Sin II? Did it have other names in other international markets?
Edit: this was submitted as a response to https://lemmy.world/comment/3615435 but Kbin didn't seem to actually tie them together. It shows me that it was written as a reply on Kbin, but seems to have lost connection to the comment hierarchy.
They'd have to do best effort against charging devs for pirated copies.
Telemetry is also easily blocked. As a business, I'd trust that a lot less. It's why many enterprise licenses are simply self reported. The punishment isn't worth lying enough to make a difference.
Most companies would trust devs as the devs are not big enough to survive a legal fight they'd certainly lose with prejudice, meaning they'd pay court costs as well.
There is no way they'll just make up a bunch of invoices for small developers. That would be too time consuming, plus they'd need to show reasonable effort in determining the invoice. It's best to just let the devs do all the work with the fear that an audit can cost them so much more money than they'd save if they lied.