Most of the upper eschalon of 343 have left or were kicked out over the last year, including some of the worst offenders who drove the creation of the crap we've had recently such as Kiki Wolf kill.
It seems like they're internally rebuilding 343 because they know how much of a powerhouse that IP can be if done right. I'm not optimistic about the next Halo, but cautiously hopeful now at least.
I doubt it is even thoughts over how powerful Halo is as an IP. I would be shocked if MS corporate hadn’t realized that any 343 Halo is going to get shit on because “this isn’t Bungie”. And people hate 343 enough that firing them and pushing the leads out won’t raise any red flags.
But yeah. Look at how much damage control MS did when they were releasing fucking Pentiment on switch (look, I love that game with all my heart but you know things are fucked when people remember it exists). There is zero chance 343 “closes” until the next full generation… probably that gen’s refresh SKU consoles. Because it would instantly be interpreted as “xbox is dead”.
But gutting Bethesda? We already see people in this very thread talking about how it is good because they didn’t like a game one of the studios did.
It's possible people won't accept a new game just because of the name attached, but that's not what I'm seeing.
I still play Infinite pretty heavily and most of the people I chat with there are saying the same, thank the lord leadership changed, let's give it a year or two and see.
If halo infinite had been a well balanced Battle Royale game… I’d probably have thrown away everything I love due to overplaying a damn game.
I’m just so sick of multiplayer shooters. The repetition didn’t seem so bad when I was young, but now it just numbs my brain.
But BR is the perfect combo of “my squad vs the world” that you get in a PVE coop, but also the rush of beating real life opponents that makes you keep coming back.
Warzone is all my friends play now, but it’s gotten so stale that no one really pushes to squad up too frequently.
Halo infinite multiplayer is free. The forge community has created a battle royale mode I've heard. Maybe give it a shot? I don't know anything other than it exists.
I personally can't stand battle royale games, so sorry, but I hope the next isn't. It's just not what Halo is. If they released a mode, or a side game as a Battle Royale I'm all for it, but not a full main game.
I feel the burnout though. My normal gaming friends and I are in a mode of trying new games right now and don't play together as much.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Am I the only one that felt Hi-fi Rush was a disappointment? I played plenty of rhythm games and Hi-fi Rush just felt off throughout, landing beats didn’t feel satisfying and it felt off sync at timee. The story was well I can see people liking it but it felt too Disney-ish and cringe for me. I couldn’t get past playing it after the 2nd level.
It’s an interesting concept but I can’t call it a good game.
web.archive.org/web/20230924045050/…/PureDarkHe started hiding his count but he was at 11k last week and his most popular/cheapest tier is $5 USD so he makes 55k a month. So basically 660k+ a year.
Cancellation like this aren’t always bad. Especially given BG3 as a whole, sometimes it’s good to just ship a complete product, and move onto newer things. They earned a break
Yeah I don’t think so – Sequels are the thing you’re supposed to have I think. Everyone drooling over having subscriptions since MMOs sucks and it really looks like the whole culture of the industry is pretty shitty in a lot of ways
E: I guess expansions can be good so you don’t have to be an EA sports franchise if you’re not changing the engine a bunch. Other than EUIV though, whose expansions are a money grab way to make the game cost 150 bucks, I haven’t ever played DLC I can think of.
Unless the sequel is using way better tech and requires a new engine or massive engine tweaks, a sequel that comes shortly after the original release could be done better, faster and cheaper as an expansion pack.
Other than EUIV though, whose expansions are a money grab way to make the game cost 150 bucks, I haven’t ever played DLC I can think of.
Well there ya go. Paradox DLC is just bullshit. Most of them just add like 1-2 units or characters or factions which mostly boil down to an aesthetic change. Most big games get real additions via DLC that can add up to 50% more game.
The non cosmetic Paradox DLCs fundamentally change the games so if you want to actually play the latest version of the game with all the mechanics you have to get them all. You can get them on steam sale usually for like 50 bucks a couple times a year.
I’m not defending it – It is what colors me most against DLCs.
I still just don’t like the idea of it – Why not do a DLC for movies and paintings and books? It feels wrong to fork a work of art or say “Oh sorry I didn’t actually make it all here’s the other 20%”
Come to think of it – Movie sequels are kind of like that these days where it’s just one story broken up instead of multiple separate stories. I wish we just did 4 hour movies with intermission but I’m sure I’m alone there.
Just a few dlc/expansion packs that were totally worth their money
All Rimworld expansions.
Diablo 3 reaper of souls/ D2 lord of destruction
The witcher blood and wine (?)
Ballad of gay tony
Star craft ones
Red alert yuris revenge
Horizon zero dawn frozen wilds
Etc… There are good expansions that are totally worth their money and add to the overall game.
That being said, I’m not a huge dlc fan and rarely spend money on them if they don’t really add to the game. More partial to spend on dlc for smaller studio games rather than large ones.
I didn’t even buy the Rimworld DLCs and I have 500+ hours! I did look at them but didn’t buy. Now that DF is graphical I mostly just play that now tbh.
DF is a great example – 15+ years updates no DLCs unless you count the steam release.
In what world is paying 40usd for a game and 3x 30usd for 500h of entertainment not a good deal? (not particularly aimed at you, but at dlc haters in general)
I am glad when they release a dlc. I get more great content. They get some more financial support.
I am 100% against cheap cash grabs. I am 100% pro multiple well made extentions for a game that allow me to support the studio.
They didn’t add all that many units, two per race. But they did have a great impact on the game (mostly).
Also, new campaigns for each race was awesome. The level editor not only brought many fun custom maps (I still think about that weird 300 map I played when I was 16), but ensured longevity of the game until this day by enabling new maps to be played in regular games.
I miss getting all this stuff with a game or expansion too.
Patch 5 also improves inventory access, letting players manage the inventory of all companions from one single UI, regardless of whether or not they’re currently in your party.
YES. I was just looking for a mod to do this but it’s so much better when the devs build out a highly-requested feature like this.
While at camp, you can now access and manage the inventories of companions who aren’t in your active party.
Sounds like it’s not possible everywhere just at camp, also, the main thing I want is official autosorting containers, I use the mod but it can be janky at times, inventory management has put me off playing and I really want to I just got sick of organising loot and marking as items to sell and splitting stacks etc etc
You know I was trying to figure out why I lost interest in Chapter 3 and started playing Total War, and I think this is it (also a dialogue bug that made companions start spoiling the plot…)
I’ve never been a huge fan of inventory management and after a while it gets very tedious in BG3.
Jokes on me though, I’m playing Thorek in Warhammer 2 rn and he’s a crafting lord so I turned a semi-RTS into an inventory management game anyways.
The inventory management in the game is shockingly bad.
“Oh, I got a new companion. I wonder what I can equip them with.”
Good luck, because the gear is scattered among your inactive companions, or the chests that might be locked to you in co-op.
“I need to take a potion mid combat”
It’s somewhere in those 20 inventory wheels!
The whole inventory weight is kind of pointless as well, since you can send to camp at any point, and there’s very few places where you can’t just go back and get something. It’s just inconvenience kept for the sake of following some arbitrary rules.
Gear especially should just be kept in a separate place from consumables and quest items, with maybe some quick swap wardrobe feature for e.g. switching to a bludgeoning weapon for smashing walls.
Good luck, because the gear is scattered among your inactive companions, or the chests that might be locked to you in co-op.
This has explicitly been changed this patch.
It’s just inconvenience kept for the sake of following some arbitrary rules.
It’s on one hand a BG throwback and more.importantly a minor impediment to the time-tested tactic in Larian games of “barrelmancy.” Look up some Telekinesis runs on Divinity:Original Sin to see why.
Palworld didn’t rip off Pokemon in the way these Chinese clones are ripping off Palworld, though. Like, the marketing of the clones literally say players “survive with their pals,” like theyre not even trying to hide it. Palworld was pretty careful to avoid terms like “pocket monster” or “pokemon” in its marketing.
Also, not sure if this really counts as accusing anyone of anything. He is pointing out that his game is successful enough to warrant multiple companies trying to rip off his own game. Honestly, you know you’ve made the big leagues when your products are getting rip offs in China.
A series of Chinese cartoon shorts called Miracle Star is the culprit here. They hew pretty closely to Gumball’s animal collective comedy, with some very slight differences. For example: Instead of a kitten protagonist, they star … a billy goat. It’s not just Miracle Star’s aesthetic that looks eerily like Gumball’s; the show also takes shots and scenes wholesale.
Fans picked up on this back in 2015, and the video above shows a direct comparison between the two. While Cartoon Network hasn’t taken any action against Miracle Star, it’s basically an open secret at this point that the Gumball lookalike exists.
It wasn’t until The Amazing World of Gumball’s newest episode, which made it online earlier this week, that Cartoon Network addressed the Miracle Star debacle more directly. An episode called “The Copycats” features a cartoon about a family remarkably like Gumball’s, made up of a mixed crowd of animals. (The one major difference? Gumball’s little sister is curiously missing from the family, which one viewer says may be a nod to China’s one-child policy.) Not only are these “copycats” very similar to the main cast, but they’re almost direct copies of the characters from Miracle Star.
I agree. Plus there’s a difference between ripping off and being inspired/influenced. Is palworld a Pokemon-esque game? Yes, but it’s not a rip off or clone since it’s different. Now if they gave the pals evolutions then yeah that would def be a red flag lol.
These actual clones are actually ripping off palworld.
Some of the models in Palworld look uncannily similar to Pokemon assets. Could be the result of AI being used though, can’t really remember the details of the controversy back when it came out.
Edit:
Like these models seem to have similar designs for example
Pokemon has so little artistic identity anymore that I literally cannot tell you which of those two is from Pokemon and I play Pokemon literally every day.
I suppose they only did it now due to some license agreement expiring?
Yep, if I understand it right, Denuvo charges an annual fee to be used. That's why you always see it getting removed after the game loses relevance, when sales aren't enough to justify paying for Denuvo anymore.
Kind of weird how, because Bethesda (and other publishers) are Denuvo's consumer, this particular anti-consumer license agreement is actually benefiting the players, haha.
Maybe it came along at the right time in my life, but Fallout 4 has got to be in my top 2-3 games ever.
The atmosphere in 4 is unlike almost anything I’ve played before or since. The story is great fun and I loved the settlement-building - it gave the game a sort of second life as a fairly chill building game once the story was complete.
Fallout 76 was just poorly judged and clunky. The multiplayer aspect ruined it. Although with that said, I did enjoy the C.A.M.P. idea. That was a good mechanic.
People can argue whether it’s as good as the previous fallout games, but it was in no way a failure. I quite enjoyed it too, and it being not as good as 3 or NV doesn’t mean it’s down in the gutter with 76.
My problem with 4 was that I didn’t identify with the protagonist much. The world was great but the main story arc was pretty cringe. There’s a million ways to do a revenge arc and they tried to be like “oh millennials all have kids now so let’s do that” and it just missed the mark.
It also wasn’t universally hated. It came out to a pretty decent reception. Mixed with the normal response to Bethesda bugs.
76 was universally panned. Super buggy, to pvp oriented, none of the story that people wanted from fall out, over filled with bad micro transactions. It was a hollow shell, and the shell wasn’t all that good looking.
It wasn’t hated, but faint praise for a main release of one of your biggest IPs is pretty far from infallible. Alarms should have been going off, but they were ignored.
Yes it got a full media blitz. That doesn’t mean it was well received by players. You can look at the breakdown by time on steam and see significant negative reviews at release. It improved over time.
There was a good bit of story in 76, though? I quite liked the storyline where you take up the mantle of a radio drama heroine after finding out what happened to the previous holders of the title and breaking into their secret lair.
Or, I dunno, does it not count as story because most of the important events have already happened? Maybe it’s “lore.” I had a good time with it, anyway.
The problem with 76 isn’t even the story to me, I thought it was decent, it’s the lack of endgame content. I love the fallout world, and have around 1300 hours into 76, but I don’t play anymore because there’s nothing worth doing.
I get the feeling that there is something like a “look at them laughing with us!” when really we are laughing at them, kinda situation… you know?
Like they think that so many mods being made is because we love their games, when a majority of mods are really the fans fixing shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place.
It sure comes from a place of love, perhaps, but it shouldn’t be happening to such an extent in the first place! I shouldn’t need a UI mod to play Bethesda games! Not should there ever be not one, but several Unnofficial Patches!
It was on the lower end of favorable, lots of 8s about 10% of professionals being mixed. That’s not well received. Steam was about 75% positive, that’s not glowing reviews. It’s a good, but not great game. That’s great for a random indie title or a yearly release, but for once a decade franchise title, it’s not good.
Metacritic: 87 critical, 6.8 User (game was very divisive for the old fans in particular so that's not unusual IMO. You can see reviews swing wildly there with sub-5's and 9-10 both all over the place)
Steam: is not 75%. I am not sure where you're going that. It's 83% all time, 89% recent, which I find very interesting actually.
You're welcome to throw out all of the above if you don't like the sites for whatever reason, but if you could show 3-4 other examples from sites you'd consider valid if you take with issue the above I'd appreciate it. They were the top hits and all are major-known sites, that's about it. I just don't want to get bogged down in a source argument.
I still refuse to purchase or play it because it removed specific dialogue. The dialogue options were my favorite part of 1 and 2 and were huge parts of the world building and character progression in the world.
I get the move to 3D and real-time voicing makes that beyond prohibitive, but that was one of a few reasons I played through F2 over a hundred times and F3 twice. (NV three or four times)
Sorry we cannot afford to pay the DRM licensing fee. As a result we will no longer be able to inconvenience our customers or prevent people who were never going to pay for our game anyway from playing.
It’s twice as funny in this game because they added Denuvo a year after release. Meaning all pirates got the game DRM free on day one while paying customers got Denuvo patched in.
Because Nintendo wanted to sell those upgrades instead of someone patching them into the save file?
It’s really insane if this story is true.
You use a program to create a file. You modify the file that you created with the program using a different program. Company sues you claiming they own the file that you created with the program you legally purchased.
I wonder what tool chain Nintendo uses internally. Could Notepad++ sue Nintendo for modifying a text file created by Notepad++ without always using Notepad++? They’re unfairly cutting Notepad++ out of competition by using vim on txt files originally created with Notepad++ then profiting on the results by selling games that used the modified txt files after compiling them into games.
Japanese copyright law is literally insane. It’s simultaneously completely lax and unapplied (doujin, i.e. derivative fan works) and so constrictive you can’t breathe.
I don’t know what the implications of buying what he was selling are, but it’s possible that it functionally allowed players to cheat in multiplayer, which kind of ruins the experience of other players.
If it only affects a single-player game, on the other hand, I don’t really see a problem being caused.
I’d also add that I kind of feel that at least for this particular form, even if it is multiplayer cheating, while it’s probably not practical to mitigate every form of cheating in a multiplayer game, it’s probably possible to design the game in such a way that it can’t be attacked in this particular way.
They all have multiplayer; you can battle your Pokemon against each other. But they all, also, have exploitable bugs that make cheating without editing a save file easier since you don’t need external tools to execute them. If they were actually concerned about cheating, they’d fix the bugs first.
It’s not about cheating, it’s about making a profit. Nobody cares if you modify your save files (they do, there are ways they try to prevent that, especially in competitive multiplayer, but it’s not a legal issue). But once you start selling them, that’s when you’re officially in trouble.
I mean, let them try? I, for one, basically stopped buying new games (with the occasional exception for an indie dev). By the time the worst bugs are fixed, it’ll be on sale for 50% off anyway.
Yeah, I don’t see any reason to buy (or pre buy!) any game at all. At launch you’re paying double for a beta version basically. Like you said, wait for the actual game to be released a few months later at a good price.
Good call mentioning pre-orders as well. I never did it back in the age of physical media, but there was at least a reason for it then. Now the only reason to do it is to get some bonus skins or other garbage with your buggy game.
I’ve loved every Besthesda game and preordered Fallout 76…learned from that mistake and never again. I’ll put games on my steam list and wait for a sale.
I just picked up Fallout 2 at GOG for $2.49. There are so many games you can get for less than the price of a coffee. The best way to fight against these prices is to simply not buy.
The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.
The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.
The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.
The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.
I have no better source than the person I replied to. I was on Reddit when the game was announced and it was clear that the game was about being gollum. Plenty of people were excited.
You can go back on reddit and look. Calling it revisionist is a bit of a stretch. The temperature on this game was very much mid to uninterested. Sure there were people who were excited, but it wasn’t a majority at all.
I was excited when it was first announced. I was hoping for a stealth game with gameplay like souls games or the shadow of mordor games. Sadly the game wasn’t even close to that so I didn’t buy it.
Those were your go-tos for gameplay expectations for sneaking around as a pretty weak little goblin man? I would’ve gone for Styx instead, a game about sneaking around as a little goblin man. (Which I think actually belongs to the same publisher)
Obviously combat would have to be balanced for Gollums powers. 1v1 an orc could have been fine but anything else would overpower him. I didn’t play Styx so I can’t compare it. I played the Splinter Cell Series and Dishonored, but both offered technology and weapons with range to help with sneaking. So I opted for games with a high fantasy setting. A game with controls like Souls, balanced for sneaking and ambushes as a focus, using the environment as your asset? Feels to me like it could work. Well, nothing like Souls, Shadow or Styx happened and we got whatever the Gollum game was.
I only played one for maybe like 2 hours, but they seem like pretty good games, you could probably pick one up for cheap on sale.
Also when I think of Soulslike Gollum, all I see in my mind is this gormless little creature wielding a 6 foot axe or something and that just makes me laugh.
Anyway, yeah, Nacon/Daedelic had several studios that had more experience making stealth-action games. I mean, besides the guys that made Styx, they also have the Shadow Tactics guys. Isometric tactical stealth could’ve been another option.
It’s honestly like they just made the absolute wrong decision for all things during development.
I could have seen it as a Stardew valley-esque Hobbit farming Sim, you start with simple farming, interacting with lore accurate villagers, fishing, cave gathering as Smeagol.
Then after a certain point of the game in a quest you find the Ring and your memories start getting hazy and your farming skill starts deteriorating and your cave gathering skills improve and the Ring blanks out part of your days and suddenly you find Deagols body and get flashbacks to what happened.
In the epilogue you start your usual day in the cave ‘bed’ instead of your Hobbit hole bed and you go gathering and meet Bilbo. Then cut to black
What was released was a disaster that hadn’t had anywhere near enough thought and consideration put into it. However, frankly if you don’t think a gollum game couldn’t be good I’d have to blame it on a lack of imagination.
CD Projekt announced on October 5 that the expansion starring Idris Elba cost a hefty 275 million Polish Zloty (around $62.7 million) to develop and approximately 95 million Polish Zloty (around $21.6 million) to market.
I’m not saying repairing and adding missing functionality isn’t a good size portion of that cost, but calling it a $125 million cost based on the cost of the expansion and marketing which were already planned regardless of how well the initial release did is miss-leading at best.
Yeah this headline should really just say the ~$41m they actually spent improving the game because that’s still an incredibly impressive number (2/3 the amount of a full expansion). I hate when there’s a good story to tell but they want to make it look even better so they decide to mislead instead of just saying the actually impressive thing
When I was in school, I bought a Gameboy XPloder for 80 bucks and cheated Mews in Pokemon Red. I sold the Mews to everyone in school for 5 bucks a pop and made back way more than I invested. I don’t care if Nintendo finds out because I was 12 when comitting this heinous crime. As a bonus, I also never taxed those business profits. Checkmate capitalists.
Jokes on you, I'm boycotting the game since Epic bought it and forced me to create an epic account to play it. After I purchased it on Steam, mind you. Absolute douche move and they can go fuck themselves. It should be illegal to alter a game post-launch so that you can't play it under the same circumstances when you bought it.
If I recall correctly they were offering refunds for a time on Steam, regardless of date purchased/hours played when the buyout was first announced. I'm not sure if it's still available, but couldn't hurt to ask.
Also OP would have accepted tos which no doubt set out you don’t own the game only a licence to access the game, once it moved off their platform they offered a refund… Shit yes but it’s what everyone signed up for when they kept paying steam
The ToS can’t take precedence over local consumer laws. That doesn’t change the fact in most cases you only own a licence to access the game not the game itself
Yep. I haven't played since then, partly for the reason you said and partly cause they took away Linux support at the same time, even if you already owned the game on Steam where Linux was fully supported.
The straw for me was when they made Snow Day competitive only. Stupid fucking decision and ruined the game for those of us who just got on to do some casual snow day.
I’m pretty sure this is because Epic servers don’t support Linux, payday 2 ran into this recently where Linux just no longer works. Epic is such a shit stain on the games industry
You mean you can’t play Rocket League on Linux at all? I haven’t played recently but a couple months ago it worked for me totally fine through Heroic Launcher.
I think he meant that it used to have a native Linux version, so much so that I got my copy from buying a steam controller. The first thing that epic did was rove the Linux build, and we had to use proton to play it. I remember complaining at the time and got a response from those dumbasses that always troll Linux users on steam saying something like “that’s your problem, the game still works for windows, just use windows”, I guess those same people now just play it on the epic store or whatever, because they seem so complacent when the game was removed from some people that I can only assume they were also complacent when it was removed from them.
Yeah that’s what I assumed, but saying “Epic servers don’t support Linux” had me a bit confused.
Also, the game is still playable from steam as long as you bought it before it was moved to the epic store. Not trying to defend epic, if it was up to me it would still be on steam, but those people probably haven’t had to move at all.
I haven’t tried multiplayer, but I have played against bots on Linux through Steam and it works fine. I used to play MP in RL on Linux, butb I’m not touching that again now that Epic messed with it.
Admittedly I was inferring from the comment that the servers don’t work on Linux, specifically because of the example I used (payday 2) where that IS the case because of the switch to Epic’s servers a few months ago
if you dropped game to $30 from $60, would double or more people buy it? or would too many people see the lower price and think it must be a shitty game to be 'that low' and pass on it?
People made that point about Hollow Knight. At $15, people will assume it’s poor quality or a short game, when it actually has tons of content and is better quality than most AAA games. HK is a rare example of a game that’s too cheap.
Imo the best example of an underpriced game is Terraria. The game stayed 10$ for the longest time, had a decade of updates(not just tiny ones), ridiculous hours of playtime and people even complained the devs were “greedy” when they increased the price of a steam sale of it(which the game is still an unbelievably good value)
They’re actually currently working on the final final final final final final update, Every update from 1.4.0.1 through 1.4.5 were all supposed to be the final updates lol.
“We super mean it this time guys…” - Cenx, the creative director of Terraria
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