ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Maybe if emulating the game wasn't often better than playing it on the only hardware the game is made for...

If only costs, personnel, and risk could be divided that easily.

I think the new management at Sony agrees, but what that means is that people get laid off.

On a Game Mess Mornings (yesterday, I think?) it was something like $600M profit on a $7B investment, which are some thin margins, and things are trending in the other direction, which means it's not sustainable. Anyone looking at $300M budgets for a Spider-Man game and $200M for Horizon could wager a guess that it's not sustainable. The blame still lies at the feet of Sony for stretching themselves so thin in the first place and then axing these people who potentially uprooted their lives to take these jobs, but it doesn't make sense to keep throwing money at things like PSVR2 games or live service schemes that won't make their money back.

Not relevant enough? Valhalla made Ubisoft $1 billion. It's one of those games that sells to the type of person who only buys a couple of games per year alongside sports titles and Rockstar games.

What I said was that the developer may have other investors in the studio or the project even if they have a publisher. Immortals of Aveum, for instance, was published by EA but largely funded by venture capital.

The publishers acquire funding this same way. Sony, 2K, and Bandai Namco have all operated as the publishers for their games, and they're all publicly traded companies. They pay the upfront cost for development that both partners in that deal wish to make a return on, and right now, the publishers or other investors (which may still exist regardless of a publisher deal) are scared of throwing money at lots of game pitches these days.

So many businesses operate on debt and investments. "If you're going to gamble, do it with somebody else's money." A lot of opportunities to acquire funding for developing video games have just dried up.

I know they're aware that they made a game that's nothing like old Rainbow Six, and that's the part that sucks. If they want it to outgrow its legacy, they ought to call it something else and make an actual Rainbow Six game again.

Your best bet is to just go on Steam and start filtering by tags. You can click on a search and search for both "JRPG" and "Turn-based combat" tags, and that will give you a good list of games in the ballpark of Phantasy Star.

No worries. I was not really able to deduce any more depth out of the combat, really. There were some defensive options that seem to always cancel into offense options to feel snappier, but I think it was really a matter of what the game bothered to teach me and what I needed to do in order to make it through the game. If they want to make it a priority on the sequel, I trust them to know how to do that.

I did finish it. Liked it, really enjoyed the presentation. There was a bit of abstract in the ending, which isn't really my bag, but I'm on board for the sequel.

I don't mean to sound rude, but it seems strange to pine for something lost that not only isn't lost but also you don't seem to have looked very hard for. There are some high profile turn based RPG hits all the time. Pokemon games are still turn based RPGs, and that's the most successful entertainment property of all time.

That game is worth putting up with its jank. You may not know exactly what the character is going to say, but each option is always channeling either James Bond, Jack Bauer, or Jason Bourne.

I don't know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:

• only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
• those factions' quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
• change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine's "Narrative Legos" video, but it doesn't even have to be that advanced

It wouldn't involve grinding. If I still haven't articulated it well enough, don't worry about it, because that game doesn't exist anyway.

I'm going through some more of The Outer Worlds. Still really enjoying it. It's got a good pace to it.

Palworld is still my second screen game for podcasts and such. It needs some tweaking in the progression, but I'm at the point now where I can expand to additional bases.

I picked up Penny's Big Breakaway. It feels great to play. The boss fights are really interesting. This could and should have been one of the best platformers I've ever played, and maybe it still is, but some bugs and jank occasionally get in the way. If you're swinging from your yo-yo and hit a wall, you're supposed to do a small climbing animation, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes when riding your yo-yo, you'll kind of just skip and jump off with poor feedback for why. Sometimes you get stuck in a wall. The design for air dashing by pressing the button twice can often get eaten by other inputs, and that doesn't feel great. The bugs and jank are not the most prevalent part of the experience, but they happen enough to bring down my opinion of the game a peg or two. I'd highly recommend this game, but maybe wait a few months for a couple of patches.

My friends and I beat the main campaign of Quake II in co-op. It's much faster in co-op and with the compass feature than they intended, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Next we'll move on to the expansions.

Still labbing some stuff in Skullgirls for my Combo Breaker grind. It's painful going through replays for my losses, but it's necessary, and I took good notes.

I had been dipping my toes into the waters of loot games with Titan Quest, and I think I'm at the point now where I can say I see the appeal with the genre and I'll stick with it. For this game in particular, I do wish the bosses were more involved, because they don't really hit a crescendo that a boss fight should have. Due to what defensive options the game gives you and doesn't give you, they often just end up being running away from the guy in a circle until you can land some hits. Still, it's fun. After this game, I might check out the sequel, Grim Dawn, or V Rising.

The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.

But this isn't a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.

On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:

• The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that's not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
• Baldur's Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for "moon logic" for a reason, and I'm not sure we're better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
• What you might call "handholdy", others might call "better UX" in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur's Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
• People's attention spans didn't necessarily drop, and it's even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.

I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction's quest line in the same playthrough.