I know I'm preaching to the choir, BlahajEnjoyer, but for anyone else reading this, this is why it's important to also not play these sorts of games in addition to not spending money on them, if stopping any of this is important to you.
Enough people have left Overwatch 2 that they've resorted to putting it on Steam. Perhaps it's not happening on the timeline we would like, but people do seem to be tiring of live service nonsense.
It hasn't stopped the game from being in the top 25 most played on Steam though. And I'll bet that number is disappointing to Blizzard too, but I'm going to guess a large number of those people leaving negative reviews are still playing the game, which doesn't help.
Actually, you're right. I take that back. I let my personal dislike for the game override my thought processes. There are plenty of people who like the game, as odd as I find that fact.
What do you mean “dont turn it into a weapon,” i have a dedicated spot on my action wheel specifically for turning things into weapons. My barbarian buddy can do it as a bonus action
The people in charge of these companies, meanwhile, get to quietly count their millions. After all, they aren’t the ones who have to go on a livestream and defend the latest patch notes.
There are, however, a lot of opportunities during development for everyone down the chain to voice concerns about making an online-only game that doesn't need to be and requires them to go on a livestream to defend their patch notes.
And lots of opportunities for them to be ignored or fired. Devs can complain all they want but at the end of the day we have to do what our bosses order us to do.
If it wasn't on their minds before Diablo IV, I'll bet "defending our patch notes on a live stream" is going to be a difficult position to staff in the future for a company that's already had issues retaining talent.
I'm not sure anyone is having an issue retaining employees. Top employees, perhaps, but for a lot of businesses you don't need very many brilliant (and expensive) employees. Any competent soul will do. On that score, I can assure you that the game industry has no shortage of folks looking to get in to the industry.
I know a handful of developers (read: far too many) who have been fired for vocally disagreeing with management.
Sure, but if you want to see what happens when you have a lot of employee turnover from people not agreeing with the direction of a game, look no further than Redfall. Often times that top talent you're talking about will form their own studios and bring colleagues with them.
Maybe AAA games just don’t need to be as large or sprawling. Release one full campaign with everything you need included in the price. Then if it does well offer dlc.
As the article points out, balder’s gate was early access for 3 years, sold at full price, and still has bugs. It’s not an exception to the rule, larian just delivered a good product that had good source material behind it.
I personally like the early access model. You get the choice to play the game now, as-is, or wait for the developers to call it finished. Last Epoch is a great example. In its current state, it is absolutely not finished. It still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment, though, and I expect I’ll get hundreds more when I revisit it again when it’s officially launched.
The important caveat with EA is that the devs actually substantially expand on the early access experience. If they just spend a year or two doing minor bugfixes and then release the game it won’t go over super well. Especially if they reduced scope during early access. I’m thinking of something like Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, where the devs had described so many things they wanted to do with the game, but then didn’t realize many of those goals between when it went into EA and when it released.
it’s good enough so when I encounter glitches I simply laugh and move on.
some of the glitches I’ve encountered so far:
animated door(or wall) loop back to closed “frame” but the collision is already moved away so you can walk through the door(or wall)
ranged attack/spell sometimes doesn’t calculate the path correctly when you hover over the target, so you have to manually move yourself and try again. Some times the path blocked calculation is wrong and you could waste spells.(especially for big enough creatures)
animation glitches during conversation. or right after loading.(mostly on NPCs.)
some stuff looks reachable but due to path finding for char to “get it” it becomes unreachable. (sometimes can use mage hand to get around this if said stuff is light and not fragile.)
The only bug I’ve encountered which bothers me is the one where a PC (normally Laezel for me) gets stuck in cinematic mode and their controls get locked out until I reload.
There’s one huge bug in Act 2 where enemies in one really hard battle can shoot you through the floor. They know about it and working on it, but that one damn near killed two of my party members. There was no where you could position yourself where they couldn’t shoot to at you through the floor.
Today there is a update drop so hopefully it got fixed. I probably still have a couple region to clean up before Act2. (judging from the revealed map area. )
kotaku.com
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