Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2
Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2
Friendly reminder: This is NOT a "W"
Yes, it is better to have incentives tied to metacritic scores and units sold rather than... your actual existence.
But it is still the same bullshit. That is even worse in the era of chud influencers looking for the latest game to blame all the sins of the world on.
This article is basically the equivalent of "In rare economic W, man succeeds in using bootstraps to climb out of The Pit"
As the article says, this should be the norm, not the exception, but how can we expect it to become the norm if they don't even get positive press for it?
It sure beats "Thanks for your hard work. Now that we've released, we don't need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt."
No. This shouldn't be the norm. How "successful" a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma for no apparent reason.
But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait... the CEO doesn't have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.
I'll also add on that this kind of model actively penalizes long tail games and post release support.
The poster child of this being Terraria. According to wikipedia, it was basically the indy dev darling of the year... 2011. Getting 70-80% from different outlets. And while we don't know those initial sales figures, we do know that.. 14 years later it continues to sell well enough that there will probably never be an actual final final patch. Like, the world will have cooled down from all the nuclear war and, somehow, there will be another re-release of Skyrim and another "final for reals this time" content drop for Terraria.
Did they fix the janky dodging and rolling though?
They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.
But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn't do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.
I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play "wrong" for like 16 hours.
Yeah, I had to put it down.
The gameplay was ultimately just too annoying to me, which is a bummer because the ideas and aesthetic were exceedingly cool.
Agreed. Amazing game, but it's because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to 'read' by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more 'organic' a bit later. That's also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it's not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It's serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it's certainly not a Dark Souls-style 'dodge through the attack'. It's not Sekiro's 'running away to tease out an attack you can punish' either, he's a very slow dude in comparison.
Yeah I'd be a bit shocked if you could dodge your way through the final boss of the DLC. There are some attacks I think need to be dodged, but they feel like the exception, not the rule.
I'd like it better if they got a more permenant raise.