Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.
Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!
It's really interesting that one of the reasons Diablo 3 was a step down was the increase in handcrafted story elements that kept interrupting the procgen flow. Some games just do really well with it.
Fire Emblem Engage, having more fun with it than I thought I would. After Three Houses, I'd kinda written off Fire Emblem as not for me but only a couple hours in I'm already having fun messing around with character builds.
That's the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.
End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don't have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.
I don't think we get granular info on this stuff, all we know is this latest round of cuts involves sales too as they are moving to outsource some of that work. And that Microsoft's total head count has been mostly level since they added a ton of people with acquisitions and hires in 2022.
Hard to talk about it without getting into spoilers, but Gustave (Cox's role) was very much a leading face of the game in marketing, and I strongly suspect that was solely because they thought the game would sell better with a male lead.
It's exactly because the arcade version was amazing that I can't, lol.
Sometimes I'm ok with visual updates (and I don't even mind the look of Bubble Bobble 4 Friends much), but something's just off here. Bub's just too upright/tall? for one thing.
I don't think he's particularly strident here or anything in Japanese, but the headline here would have been better off sticking with the machine translated "nothing has changed" in the article.
There isn't any optimism in Matsuno's words here. I would have added "as always" to "economic disparity remains the same" and "again" to his comments about armed conflicts. He sounds tired of the cycle.
New engine, new gameplay style, new [licensed] IP. Lots of variables. Owlcat's exploded in size recently but I can't quite tell yet if this is their big swing like BG3 was for Larian.
I'm also confident the writing will be competent, and Ty and Daniel have have a good track record of being available to assist on adaptations. I just hope I like the player characters more this time around. I didn't quite click with anyone in the Pathfinder games (haven't tried Rogue Trader yet).
Once bitten, twice shy. They've had really mixed results doing this with the brand in the past, and their current corporate strategy suggests it's not happening again anytime soon.
I think the Bravely series is the closest to that we'll be in these times, although it's not even clear at this point if that series is continuing or not.
Final Fantasy X was also the first pure turn-based game in the mainline series since 1990.
I keep hearing people cite Final Fantasy nostalgia with Expedition 33, but pure turn-based combat with realistic graphics happened exactly once in all of Final Fantasy. I don't get it. Pure turn-based is much more of a thing in the rest of the genre, including SQEX's other properties.
The writing was already on the wall following the massive successes of Persona 5 and Honkai Star Rail. Expedition 33 had its moment in the zeitgeist, but at this time it's not clear it will be the massive revenue generator those games are. And that's the goal for mainline FF.
That said, SQEX has been very internally-driven for a while now, and their major teams get more excited about developing games with action elements. I'd be very surprised if FF17 returned to turn-based for that reason alone.
It's too early to draw any conclusions. Take it from Mat Piscatella, who's forgotten more about video game market research than I ever learned myself.
Hardware launches are not like game releases, anyway. It's the establishment of a new product market, and early game releases on consoles have an ebb and flow to them that later blockbusters do not. It's about building growth, not first-week sales.
You're not going to find more text/explicit plot than you have already. That said, there is good environmental storytelling in the last zone of the game. The next zone for you (Wrecked Ship) might have a little more for you to chew on. I'd say get through that zone and then see how you feel about it. If you like it, the ending will probably feel rewarding.
Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.
Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!