Baldur's Gate 3 outsold its predecessors by an order of magnitude. I think you're overestimating the cultural clout that a game from 23 years earlier carries. Games just didn't reach anywhere near as many people back then.
Yeah, but I'm not going to hold it against them when they backed out on it. I would not be playing Street Fighter 6 right now if Capcom went through with their initial licensing changes, but for similar reasons, they didn't. So for now, it's cool. In situations like this though, you just have to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat if they misbehave.
There will continue to be games to play because people will continue to make them. A bad experience in one place leads to a new studio designed not to repeat it.
I'm a recent D&D fan, largely because of BG3. What's the tl;dr for why people hate Hasbro and Wizards? Hopefully a slightly longer explanation than just the word "greed".
I'm aware, but it will likely be mechanically similar. If it turns out to be a Bloodlines 2 situation, I can always just stick to the first game and Grim Dawn, maybe V Rising. And all of that is assuming that as I spend more time in Titan Quest I still enjoy it.
You slipped in an edit while I was responding, and I think the gist of it is that you and I fundamentally don't agree, especially not the hyperbolic flourish you used. I think you'll continue to see plenty of great games come out in the next decades, because people still want to buy games and other people still want to make them.
No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that's because their games notably sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man's Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you're making?
When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.
The last EA game I bought was Jedi: Fallen Order for $4, and I still felt ripped off, because EA adds a mandatory online connection check to every game they release now, including Immortals.
It's boomer shooters or nothing in that space right now. We're starving out here. On my radar in the coming year or two are Mouse, Core Decay, and Agent 64, but no one knows what kind of quality we'll get out of those. Also, is it a crime to just throw in some competitive multiplayer that's meant to be played a handful of times with friends instead of being the next e-sport?
Did you finish BG3? The plot is very by-the-numbers, but the characters' stories weaving in and out of it was the main event in that game, and lots of those reach their conclusions in Act 3. In Pillars 1, the problem I had with the party members' stories were that they all felt like the beginning of a storyline instead of a complete arc, but a friend of mine who's finished Pillars 2 tells me that they deliver on this front much better in the sequel.
One word of warning to you on Pillars 2, since you think so highly of the combat in Pillars 1, is that part of the reason it might be more readable this time around is that battles are smaller-scale, by a smidge. Your party size is restricted to 5 instead 6, and I'm assuming that enemy mobs as the game goes on will scale down proportionally compared to Pillars 1. But skill checks in dialogue to solve problems by means other than combat? Character build depth? Environment readability, conveying the approximate level of the quests in your journal, the inconvenience of managing your stronghold while you're out adventuring...I think the developers agreed with me on all of my complaints with the first game, because what I've seen of the early hours of this game is an answer to all of it.
I have unfortunately never had the chance to play D&D (only ever had one friend who was interested), so I compare cRPGs to other video games, where having shitty enemies between points of interest is pretty much expected.
ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 1,078Joined 2 yr. ago
Microsoft themselves couldn't will that into existence with the Windows Store.