The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations
If fewer players would buy the shitty games, and stop buying the battle passes and mtx, they would stop selling them. It’s all about profit.
What do you think would have happened if Overwatch 2 launched and had a consistent player count of zero?
But it seems that a lot of people don’t care as much as I want them to, and a lot of people have less self control than a toddler. Little will change.
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.
That decision is working out so well for them, too! It’s setting records!
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.
The vast majority of them probably never played the game in the first place.
Eh, I don’t know about that. It’s free to play and huge in popular culture because tons of people played it.
It’s huge in popular culture because of the source filmmaker porn. Certainly not the game itself.
That’s an absurd take.
Exactly what you said. Most devs know they’re not putting out high quality games but the money flows in and that’s what they’re told to design.
Those games make money on whale players. People who spend thousands of dollars.
But if whales have no one to play with those whales end up leaving too.
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.
Sweet, sweet short term profits tho
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
Pro-tip: if a low-health enemy is close to escaping to call for help you can just throw Baldur’s Gate 3 at them for that last bit of damage!
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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.)
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. )
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.
I’ve had that one happen, and seen it on Let’s Plays. It’s always Lae’zel.
It’s because her cuteness is too powerful. The game struggles to contain it
That’s what Solasta did. (Developer: Tactical Adventures)
Then we got two more fully-fleshed adventures as DLC’s, which I was more than happy to buy.
Find good developers and then (if you can) pay full price so they can keep making great, microtransaction-free games.
I mean one studio makes a great game and a bunch of other studios make shitty games… then gamers like the game which is better and want more games to be like that. Traditionally that’s called market forces, not a weapon.
Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.
What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.
Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.
That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.
Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.
It’s the same bullshit as return2office, management has its interests which include armies of fungible resources they can track effectively via closure velocity.
It’s why big organizations are less efficient but they’re what we have because of marketing inertia (people assume big companies produce better product).
Oh nooo! Anyway, make the best game you can.
AAA studios, you can stop crying, you’re like a master car mechanic crying because you can’t bolt down a single goddamn nut with pre-existing tooling.
If it was a weapon, I’d probably accidently kill Gale with it. :(
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.
Use it like a BFG, we need to focus on quality games… not hamster wheels with micro transactions and battle passes.
Triple A devs: Help, we don’t want to make good games, we want to make casinos!
Kotaku been smoking that pack since day one
My issue with all of this is thus, and the article touched on it a bit:
Gamers don’t give a shit if games are buggy. Actually, we only really want it to be a baseline level of playable. And even then, we’ll probably suffer through a lot. What we want is a fun game.
In fact, I don’t actually think most of us give a particular shit about micro transactions or battle passes other than that they tend to be accompanied by games that are abjectly less fun without them. I wouldn’t have batter an eye if baldurs gate has a cosmetic store because what I want has nothing to do with that.
I want to play games that are fun. That’s the bottom line. Baldurs gate is incredible because it’s good. I would have paid more for it than I did. I would have suffered through micro transactions and battle passes if I had to. Because I don’t give a shit about that.
I’m just tired of games releasing and not being fun.
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