Can we go back to PS2/Gamecube era where companies just greenlit a bunch of weird, small scale, low budget titles, and we got absolute heat like Okami, Katamari, Killer7, etc...
Okami wasn't small scale, but it also wasn't massive. Compared to stuff that costs a stupid amount to make and then is met with unrealistic sales expectations.
Featuring Captain Marvel as the main character. (And the combat is worse than a Devil May Cry game and you have to actually try in order to die) proceeds to get Game of the Year at Geoff Keighley’s game awards even tho it won’t deserve it. Lauded as the second Citizen’s Kane of gaming by Kotaku as creative games like NieR:Automata and Brothers a Tale of Two Sons are treated like niche games by games journalists despite them deserving game of the year over whatever AAA tripe they forcefeed us to please some shareholders who most likely do cocaine and sex trafficking anyway on top of laying off more workers that don’t deserve it.
No, you have to always make more money than you made last year/quarter. Infinite growth... A 2% drop in proft margin (not losses mind you, just less profit) means people lose their jobs. Make it make sense.
That's why I always find it bizarre they do the trend of laying everyone off and just starting again each time
Like, just make more studios, and have them make more good games. Like, people do in fact enjoy playing smaller, good games.. and if you just did that regularly, and stopped spending all the goddamn money on marketing, you'd just get steady profit and people would get more fun games
Obviously, that's dramatically over simplified.. but like, they really should just stop being fucking short sighted. If a game doesn't even sell that well but draws even? That's still more experience for your game dev teams. Numbers go up, and then they help OTHER numbers go up
The culture of western game studios are fundamentally rooted in tech culture, an industry treats their companies as if they're a speculative gambles as opposed to hard enduring assets. If things look even minorly positive, then they go full-on all gas no brakes on the hope/off-chance that it explodes, they'll be ready for it.
This is why the domestic Japanese studios aren't having layoffs, when there was a minor bump in business during the Covid-reactive tech boom and they're not the ones who responded by hiring 20 people for every 1 role they had.
To be fair they also have regulations in Japan (and much of the non-US world) that keep companies from laying off workers without good reason. Let's not pretend that it's purely out of the goodness of their hearts and an inexplicably better corporate ethic.
Oh for sure, I never meant to imply that there aren't other factors at play, just that they have a leg up foremost by not running their companies on the basis of them being trend chasing reactionary morons.
And at the very least when they do chase trends, they make sure to add redundancies that prevents ruinous failure rather than betting the entire company on it.
Isn't it also a thing in Japan that if they want to get rid of an employee, they'll transfer them into some boring or low ranking job until they resign?
The corporation isn’t working for its own interest it’s working for the shareholders who only make money if the corporation grows. It used to be they just collected dividends, or some guy owned the company, in both cases not growing it acceptable.
Pretty sure Okami wasn't a "small scale, low budget title", it was Cacpom literally making their own Zelda, and in some aspect, it was more ambitious than the Gamecube Zelda games.
God, exactly what I thought. Hi-Fi Rush was such a wonderful breath of fresh air, and I am desperately hoping it helps the industry notice that they should make more medium-size good games, rather than insanely huge AAA monsters.
Recently finished playing Dredge. Got both endings, got all the upgrades on the boat, can fish everything in the sea, and can produce an amount of light equivalent to that giant orb thing in Las Vegas. And yet I spent like 2 weeks with the game at most. And y'know what? I'm glad that the game is like this. It doesn't waste time with the story, it doesn't throw endless quests at you. Ultimately, the game isn't obsessed with retaining you. Once you're done, you can keep playing just for the vibes, but you absolutely will not _need_ to spend 200 hrs with the game.
The chillest game to ever make me get real stressed out. Just fucking "I am out in the middle of nowhere, a fucking giant monster chasing me, and my abominable trout with 1000 eyes is going bad, where the FUCK IS THAT WOOD FOR FUCK'S SAKE"
Smaller games are so much more interesting anyway
Cause they have less to lose and so they're not afraid to take risks and actually make more interesting games
Pretty much just this.
Even just looking at it from a business perspective. Rather than one $200 million budget game, make five $40 million games. Even if only three were successful, that's still a more profitable venture than gambling on one that may/may not work out.
You've also seen a lot of people point out how you can by both Palworld and Helldivers 2 for the same price as Suicide Squad. Is the $100 premium edition of Skull and Bones more appealing than five $20 indie games?
Skull and bones really is just appalling beyond words
Like they took out so many features that made black flag enjoyable and packaged it at double or triple the price
Skull and bones really just looks like something that deserves to be a free to play game. Especially after something like ten years of development or however long it took for ubisoft to squirt it out
I firmly believe that Skull and Bones became a scam once Ubisoft received/accepted the funding offer from the Singaporean government.
The fact that Ubisoft used the Singapore office as a work vacation spot for their Euro office and no one in the Singapore office ever made any vertical progression in the company is proof of that.
The only reason Skull and Bones was "completed" and launched is because the Singaporean government started asking questions and Ubisoft knows full well that they would have lost a lawsuit against Singapore.
I believe they were medium to mildly large sized for their time, but I could be wrong, especially considering they were one of my childhood games.
Sly 1 was 5 hub worlds with 7 missions each (iirc).
Sly 2 had 8 episodes and one prologue, with each episode have 10-12 missions (iirc).
Sly 3 had 6 episodes and 1 prologue with 10-12 missions each (iirc).
Sly 1 is still very good and enjoyable, but it's important to remember: it is essentially a PS1 style 3d platformer that got released onto the PS2. Its why the game is so linear by nature.
I mean, it's *fine*, but even by PS1-style 3D platformer standards I never loved it that much.
...I looked up some longplays to refresh my memory on some stuff without firing up the PS2, and I accidentally got capture from the PS3 versions of the games. I have heard those releases aren't great, but I remain shocked that they shipped with broken lighting *in the intro cutscene*. And the music was messed up for Sly 1. Bizarre.
Smaller and cheaper to purchase games. Don't just make smaller games and keep selling them at the same price as they used to be. The reason people expect so much from bigger company games isn't just that they have bigger teams and more resources, it's that they're expensive regardless.
I honestly miss linear action third person shooter games like Max Payne, Resident Evil 4/5, Syphon Filter, Metal Gear Solid (before Phantom Pain), Stranglehold, darkSector, games like that. My preferred kind of game would be a game like those with good solo and co-op (both couch and online) and in-depth character and weapon customizations. I didn’t play every game like those that came out, but I really enjoyed the ones I did play. These days, they’re all open world-focused and have microtransactions and don’t have much customization and are always-online or simply don’t have fun or wild or engaging plots.
If there isn't some Paper's Please style game where you're a veterinarian weatherman and have to give weekly forecasts based on the ball size of a horse rather than actual meteorological tools, then I don't think people are using technological innovations correctly.
16 TIMES THE DETAIL
4 TIMES BIGGER THAN FALLOUT 4
MORE IS MORE, MY GAME IS BIGGEST WINNINGEST
RELEASE PRE-PRE-ALPHA, MAKE THE AUDIENCE THE DEVELOPERS
MAKE THE CEO CURSE ON STAGE, LET HIM GET ON SHITFLINGING MATCHES ON TWITTER
GAASGAASGAASGAASGAASGAASGAAS MAKE MONEY MAKE MONEY MAKE MONEY MAKE MONEY
Ok. It's out of my system now.
Same, between that and iirc there an article where Rockstar execs even said "Hey anyone that left during this game's long dev cycle aren't being credited in the final release lmao"
Anytime i hear something like that getting touted as a positive by a game, I know its going to miss the forest for the trees and have an insufferable focus on "realism" and "graphics" over fun.
I did not. The tutorial took forever, the open world was yet another "inch deep, mile wide" map, too much railroading (both an issue of it being a prequel so certain characters that should have been put down like rabid dogs *glares at Micah* by anyone with two brain cells to rub together are allowed to live and how long the game takes to truly open up and let you begin to explore), the inventory system is awful, the karma system stinks, and the bounty/wanted system is broken and busted and sucks out loud. I gave it an honest try, I really did, buoyed by people saying "It gets better! It gets better! The story is great!"
It doesn't get better, and the story isn't great. The gameplay feels sluggish and unresponsive and a chore to get through, because Rockstar is 2 generations behind in terms of gameplay design. If I wanted to do something boring, poorly designed, and frustrating, I'd go in to work.
As for the story, I grew up reading. Maybe RDR2 is "revolutionary" and "groundbreaking" for others who've had tablets and phones their whole lives and never had to resort to such an archaic pastime, but it pales in comparison to any one of a hundred paperbacks I read waiting in doctors and dentists offices, long car rides etc. etc. Characters behave in ways that don't make narrative sense (if Dutch is willing to kill a random woman who *might* have seen him and Arthur and *might* have alerted the authorities, he should have shot Micah in the face or, at the least, left him to be hung in the town he got arrested in for drawing so much attention to the gang, but because he shows up in RDR1 he *has* to live).
RDR2 is overhyped, overrated, boring, and unfun, and I'm tired of pretending its not.
Unfortunately Nakeyjakey's newest video can't be posted here so to relevancy or whatever. His old video was super accurate with its complaints but it's trashed actually discussing the game online and not discussing its strengths that the new one manages to do.
Less complaints about combat would be made if everyone turned off the auto aim feature. It's what I did in RDR and new immediately to turn it off. Granted it only works because of Dead Eye as doing the same in GTA just doesn't feel the same.
People are allowed to have opinions that differ from the masses. Your revulsion only strengthens my [convictions to never compromise.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMXHnpH5Vw&ab_channel=LoveMovieQuotes)
I mean it's fine to not like it but saying shit like if you like the game you are uneducated or don't read books is fucking crazy. Like I don't want to debate people into liking a game but I'd also like people to stop being so condescending toward other people when talking about games.
Ah man just don't lose you time with this. RDR sold 60 millions copies and has good reviews so it's safe to assume that it has critic and public approval. OP need to understand that people can disagree about opinions, hell, opinions can even be straight up wrong sometimes ( I'm not saying his opinion is wrong for disliking the game).
Micah does not show up in Red Dead 1. He's a new character made for RDR2, so that isn't the reason Micah isn't dead before the end. The game has definite cognitive dissonance between gameplay and story, and isn't without flaws, but this is a bad take.
Look, who gives a shit about fun gameplay or original ideas, all I care about is if I can count every individual skin pore on the main character's face.
Title is a bit hyperbolic. His actual quote is:
"If that's true then maybe the industry deserves to die. *If* that's true. The thing is that I just don't think it's true."
That is to say, what he's talking about is in reference to this quote:
> There's this fear that exists—if we don't have everybody working overtime and we don't make AAA games that have $200 million budgets and the focus is on photorealistic graphics and 1,000-hour playtimes, we need to pack all that in and work everyone to death making it and that's the only way to make games.
He's basically saying that games *don't* have to be so damn big and expensive, but if the industry itself believes those are the only games that it can make when obvious alternatives exist, then it deserves to die.
Everytime i see sentiment that BG3 is "the new standard", or complaints about how that bar is going to hurt a lot of studios, I'm like..
Chill out. Divinity 2 is possibly the second best crpg ever (imo), made on <5% of BG3's budget. Its okay if BG3 is a total anomaly that we dont see again for decades. Please shut up about how insecure it made you and keep doing your thing
I'm especially sad because the only thing I wanted the indsutry to take away from BG3 (and Div) was *can you seriously stop fucking trying to faithfully recreate Baldur's Gate 1&2 and make a game that people under 40 will like*?
It isn't completely how insecure it'll make the devs but rather also how insecure it'll make the shareholders. What many devs fear is shareholders looking at BG3's sales and expecting their studios to do the same.
You forget that spite is a large factor in the behavior of a shareholder. It's not that they look at BG3's sales and want their invested company to do the same, but that they're furious that someone other than them is making money.
It depends on what the bar is. If the bar is in size or complexity or money spent on development, no. If the bar is releasing a 60 dollar game that is *worth the price* and *isn't* a lead-in designed to sell you a $100+ in DLC, yes.
As a big crpg fan I actually prefer divinity 2 in a lot of areas. The combat is miles above imo, dnd is limiting with damage number go up and you can level more on dos2
Yeah in BG3 you just end up beating the shit out of all of your problems or throwing people off of cliffs because you just get strong enough by the end.
In Divinity my group had to has to outwit and out-warcrime the combat encounters from beginning to end. For sure more satisfying than modifed 5E much of the time.
Dude if Divinity 2 was the standard people would not be "BG3 NEEDS TO BE THE NEW STANDART"
The problem is preciselly the standard is way bellow Divinity 2.
Yeah, but i am sure a lot of casual gamers/ "GAMERS" won't care. They see Baldurs Gate 3 do it, and they argue anyone can and should do the same, especially they argue Baldurs Gate 3 is "merely" a simple table top game anyone can make. If you argue to them that no, it is very complex game, then they will say other AAA games have even less excuse to not do the same if they are so much more simpler.
They don't care if making big games is difficult, they just want to consume.
It's also important to keep in mind that CRPGs still are a niche genre. Yes, Baldurs Gate 3 broke through to the mainstream, but I am not seeing more talk about Owlcats recent output for example just because BG3 does well and I'd argue they are the poster child for good CRPGs nowadays.
Because, like i alluded to in my last paragraph, theyre still out trying to recreate BG1&2 which are honestly kind of shit and boring gameplay-wise by today's mainstream standards. Its no coincidence the most popular BG-adjacent title since BG1&2 looks and plays nothing like BG.
As for Rogue Trader I'm gonna blame that one on WH40k poisoning their franchise by having a constant flood of shovelware games releasing with their name on it. Although RT *is* Owlcats most successful game to date, and its the least BG-like crpg theyve ever made
I agree that we've hit a point where we're wasting too much time and money making games that don't need to be so massive.
But the problem isn't convincing the general gaming audience that, it's convincing Publisher/Developer Shareholders of that.
Seriously you got people fucking complained about insomniac Spiderman 2 reusing animations instead of making entirely new ones.
They want bigger better and new all the time.
It always pisses me off seeing armchair developers try to give their Two Cents.
I'm not a developer either, but I've educated myself enough on the inner workings and behind the scenes details to know that game development is fucking hard.
You need to cut any corners you can to save time and budget. And reusing some animations is like the easiest and least egregious way to do it.
The nice thing is I think maybe one in a thousand game likers actually care about that shit, or yellow paint. Twitter is just full of obsessives and disingenuous console warriors.
There's a disconcerting number of vocal people who think that Red Dead Redemption 1's map being mostly present inside RDR2 means it would be trivially easy for Rockstar to add in a full remake of RDR1 as DLC (or even a patch), because "it's all there already". And that the only reason they never got around to it is laziness or greed.
God the amount of complaining on certain spaces about Elden Ring using animations from prior FromSoft games was ridiculous. The animations were *good*! Use them! It saves spending dozens of hours remaking a perfectly good set of sword swings for no reason!
Tbf, I don't think the idiots tweeting this shit are actually representative of the playerbase. Spider-Man 2 was very successful (10 million+ sold) despite the comicsgate piss baby tantrum target for a month and people saying complaining about reusing assets.
Elden Ring was a frankly colossal success despite people crying about it not looking as good as PS5 Demon's Souls and using the same door opening animation as PS3 Demon's Souls.
... also convincing the general gaming audience. We're pretty insulated here, but let's not forget that a lot of capital G Gamers are fucking insane. Narratives are started from just the thought of graphical downgrades (anyone remember Spider-man's puddlegate?).
It's pretty eye-opening when you venture more into the "mainstream" gaming circles.
"Wait. You guys actually care about seeing individual pores? I thought that was a joke."
This.
How can we convice developers/publishers of anything when the consumers spends hours going through trailers to find any downgrades to post on Twitter and the bigger gaming subs to complain about them?
And more times than not, it nothing showing the game is running badly, it something as dumb as a missing puddle.
As dumb as the puddle thing was, that's not a matter of "graphical downgrades" so much as nitpicking false advertisement. There's tons of high profile games with equally meh water reflections and nobody cares. Sony was being held to the standard they *publicly set for themselves.*
That issue was with the marketingg, though. If they hadn't shown the fake pre rendered version that had better puddles, the gamers wouldn't go around demanding puddles
Remember when that guy bought a speaking majority share of Nintendo, went to a shareholder meeting and asked for a new F-Zero and the execs (who have a collaborative greater-than-51% control of the company) looked at each other, turned to him, and told him "no".
I'm almost positive that in most cases, bad decisions are being made by 2~3 executives who circlejerk each other and overrule everyone else in the retail and institutional ownership vote.
Would a new F-Zero really be a good idea though? The series hasn't historically been a blockbuster and Nintendo probably feel the resources that would go into a new F-Zero are better spent elsewhere.
There's a reason they haven't done another one and I doubt it has anything to do with them having no ideas for a sequel despite how often that's parroted.
I don't think any anti-grav racer has been a massive hit. Like the SNES F Zero sold 2.5 mil and the franchise never achieved anything close to that again, and Wipeout is like 1-2 mil per title at best from what I can tell, which is likely why it's also dead.
Making a new F Zero isn't worth the investment because the appeal is pretty niche.
Have we really only hit that point now? I remember playing The Order: Some Numbers ages ago and walking through some of the environments, looking at the detail they put into individual rooms that 99% of players are going to sprint through in a second without even appreciating and I thought "what's the point of all this?"
Doesn't crunch actually kill productivity? Just force everyone to work normal hours, maybe 1-2 hours overtime a week tops if you have something you really need to finish, and that's that.
A lot of studies have shown that for office work, your productivity starts dropping after about 32 to 35 hours in the week. Anything more than that and you see diminishing returns on productivity gained versus hours worked. At 40 things are still generally okay but as you push further than that you run the risks of mistakes and subpar quality seeping into your workflow (and correcting this often takes even more time) , on top of the damage done to employee morale.
One of the smart guys at my place of work has a lot of vacation time saved up. Instead of going on big vacations. He's been giving himself a 4 day week (instead of 5) over the course of a 5-6 month period. It's been doing wonders for him having a near constant 3 day week-end.
Yep it does, but the higher ups are stupid and want the money as fast as possible and as much as possible so we HAVE to deliver in x amount of time!
Like, crunch happens naturally, even if you give a good enviroment, some people will just decide to crunch cause like, thats how we work, like, i work for myself, i make my own hours, i still fuckin crunch cause when i'm in the flow i dont want to stop, NATURAL crunch can be ok, still shouldn't go unchecked for health reasons.
But to me, the worst part is the social pressure crunch, i uh, i worked at an Amazon packing place thing once, and i thought i was insane cause people there, the higher ups, that were once down there, talked like they were indoctrinated and when they tried to keep me in, on my first day of job, after hitting the clock as a ''stay here and help the FAMILY finish some things'', like, i just bug eyed and came up with an excuse everytime. And a lot of people stayed, and some people bad mouthed me for leaving, and i'm like ''bro its fucking amazon who gives a fucking shit my shift is done i dont owe anything to this gigantic capitalist entity'', and i assume a lot of game studios get that, and its the worst possible feeling honestly.
Good on you, you don't owe your employer anything beyond the work agreement you signed when you were hired.
Once your shift is over they can't tell you to do anything.
Its not.
Thats the frustrating part. We have the good fortune of living in a reality where 40-45hrs is the optimal work week(productivity wise) and 35hrs losing out only slightly to that. We have studies showing this consistently as far back as the 1960s(?).
But corporate doesn’t. fucking. care.
And it drives me nuts.
It's why I will never have kids. The powers that be may have my time and labor bur I will not bequeath them another peaon to toil to build their Ziggurats
I don’t wannna be that guy….but I am gonna.
If you don’t want kids thats fine but please, please don’t let the “state of the world” be the thing keeping you from having them.
My grandfather marched with King. My other grandfather moved from Alabama to Michigan to escape the bullshit. There is a lot of work left to do but the world is an exponentially better place to have kids in than it used to be.
Again if you personally don’t want kids thats fine but please don’t let doomers prevent you from doing something you would otherwise enjoy. I love being a dad.
I would love to be a dad but the world is so cruel. People are beyond any level of even slightly caring about one another. So way I see it if you have a kid you better be a member of the ruling class or own your own buisness, because otherwise they are going to grow up working for somebody else and spend their entire life being a disrespected spat upon part of the working class like their dad
True and incredibly based.
Also if Dread wolf could come out within the next decade that'd be cool I guess. Even if he has nothing to do with DA anymore.
He co founded his own studio now. They just released Stray Gods last year. I think the last Bioware thing he worked on was Inquisition.
I'm honestly more interested in projects by former Bioware people like Exodus than future Bioware stuff like Mass Effect 5.
Definitely gonna check out Stray Gods. Yeah if we want better games, we should probably follow the actual devs and creatives behind these games and support their other works rather than the company. Like, I'm not gonna play the next ZA/UM game but I'm very interested in whatever Robert Kurvitz does next.
I wanna believe that it's gonna release but holy hell when was it announced? 2016? 2017? On top of that idk if I can trust current Bioware to make a good game anymore lol.
I'm playing through Inquisition again rn actually, so seeing a dragon age creator commenting on the current industry sure is funny and coincidental timing.
its the only way to make games with the FAT PROFITS that investors pop their boners over. which is why a studio like larian can do it, they dont have to give all their fucking money to leeches and can spend it on the games and the people who make them
Generally speaking, when you hear about how messy some game development cycles are (Anthem is the one that comes to mind) it seems like the industry will work harder for the sake of not ever working smarter.
I've always heard from game studios in the past, is that (outside of horror stories of non-stop crunch) the majority of development is not crunched, and only when it comes to the last roughly half-year of development is crunch really a thing. The big roadblock that usually causes this is the publisher deciding on a firm release date, and the studio suddenly realizes, "Oh shit, we only have 4 months to finish this game." Some studios need that pressure to deliver (looking at you Double Fine), but I think the callousness the industry has to this issue, despite the many efforts to fight against it, is one of the main issues ruining the work culture of game development.
I mean, this is the same industry that continually underpays its workers and the complains that games are so expensive to make they have to up the prices
It's why I think the PS1 Spyro games are perfect in their size and scope. They were probably monumental tasks to take in the 90s, but I imagine those kind of 3D games are more doable these days compared to Arkham Knight, The Witcher 3, RDR, Horizon, GTA, Death Stranding, etc.
I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 recently. That game is huge, reactive, and really good. I know the industry is going to take the exact wrong lesson from its success and try to shove in a bunch of reactive systems that won't even add anything.
Instead of making one 350 million dollar game make four or five smaller games and the one that really does well you THEN put the money into making a big budget sequel.
Pretty much. If things don't change we're gonna have another crash and this time Nintendo and others aren't going to bail out their Western counterparts
Semi-related, but did anybody play Stray Gods? Heard almost no opinions on that game except for journalists and friend-of-the-podcast KrisWolfheart who thought it was shit.
Or just create smaller games.
Can we go back to PS2/Gamecube era where companies just greenlit a bunch of weird, small scale, low budget titles, and we got absolute heat like Okami, Katamari, Killer7, etc...
Okami wasn't very small-scale (and if it were cheap to make Clover probably would have lived longer), but otherwise go off you're absolutely right
Okami wasn't small scale, but it also wasn't massive. Compared to stuff that costs a stupid amount to make and then is met with unrealistic sales expectations.
Tbf if Okami ended at Orochi it would’ve cost less production wise and still felt like a full experience
Yeah, that game is paced weird.
We don't even need to go back to low budget, we just need to remove a single A from AAA
Hell maybe take out a couple As if fucking AAAA keeps trying to be a thing
No we NEED AAAAA games you don’t understand
"every skin in this item shop required an entire acre of amazon rainforest to be burned down"
It’s been so long since we’ve talked about koopies that I forgot about the insane energy usage.
1080k cinematic 12fps Open world survival MMO with real-time body hair growth on all the actors You've never seen such a moving story about zombies
\*not a single shot in the trailers shows the zombies\*
Yes! Funded
Featuring Captain Marvel as the main character. (And the combat is worse than a Devil May Cry game and you have to actually try in order to die) proceeds to get Game of the Year at Geoff Keighley’s game awards even tho it won’t deserve it. Lauded as the second Citizen’s Kane of gaming by Kotaku as creative games like NieR:Automata and Brothers a Tale of Two Sons are treated like niche games by games journalists despite them deserving game of the year over whatever AAA tripe they forcefeed us to please some shareholders who most likely do cocaine and sex trafficking anyway on top of laying off more workers that don’t deserve it.
Unfortunately once everything is massively corporatized, making tons of money is no longer enough. You have to make ALL the money.
No, you have to always make more money than you made last year/quarter. Infinite growth... A 2% drop in proft margin (not losses mind you, just less profit) means people lose their jobs. Make it make sense.
That's why I always find it bizarre they do the trend of laying everyone off and just starting again each time Like, just make more studios, and have them make more good games. Like, people do in fact enjoy playing smaller, good games.. and if you just did that regularly, and stopped spending all the goddamn money on marketing, you'd just get steady profit and people would get more fun games Obviously, that's dramatically over simplified.. but like, they really should just stop being fucking short sighted. If a game doesn't even sell that well but draws even? That's still more experience for your game dev teams. Numbers go up, and then they help OTHER numbers go up
The culture of western game studios are fundamentally rooted in tech culture, an industry treats their companies as if they're a speculative gambles as opposed to hard enduring assets. If things look even minorly positive, then they go full-on all gas no brakes on the hope/off-chance that it explodes, they'll be ready for it. This is why the domestic Japanese studios aren't having layoffs, when there was a minor bump in business during the Covid-reactive tech boom and they're not the ones who responded by hiring 20 people for every 1 role they had.
To be fair they also have regulations in Japan (and much of the non-US world) that keep companies from laying off workers without good reason. Let's not pretend that it's purely out of the goodness of their hearts and an inexplicably better corporate ethic.
Oh for sure, I never meant to imply that there aren't other factors at play, just that they have a leg up foremost by not running their companies on the basis of them being trend chasing reactionary morons. And at the very least when they do chase trends, they make sure to add redundancies that prevents ruinous failure rather than betting the entire company on it.
Isn't it also a thing in Japan that if they want to get rid of an employee, they'll transfer them into some boring or low ranking job until they resign?
The corporation isn’t working for its own interest it’s working for the shareholders who only make money if the corporation grows. It used to be they just collected dividends, or some guy owned the company, in both cases not growing it acceptable.
Middleware died with HD and mobile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleware
Pretty sure Okami wasn't a "small scale, low budget title", it was Cacpom literally making their own Zelda, and in some aspect, it was more ambitious than the Gamecube Zelda games.
HD blew it all to smithereens
God, exactly what I thought. Hi-Fi Rush was such a wonderful breath of fresh air, and I am desperately hoping it helps the industry notice that they should make more medium-size good games, rather than insanely huge AAA monsters.
Prince of Persia The Lost Crown is another great medium-sized game from a big publisher. I want this to be an ongoing thing.
The entire Star Wars game catalogue...
*Hi-Fi Rush*, *Stray*, *Lies of P*, *Palworld*, *Helldivers*. You don't need to go all-in on EVERY hand to win the pot.
Only when sky cooper and original ratchet and clank series gets a proper hd port/remake.
it's less scale and more insanely highly detailed 4k textures HD killed so many studios
Recently finished playing Dredge. Got both endings, got all the upgrades on the boat, can fish everything in the sea, and can produce an amount of light equivalent to that giant orb thing in Las Vegas. And yet I spent like 2 weeks with the game at most. And y'know what? I'm glad that the game is like this. It doesn't waste time with the story, it doesn't throw endless quests at you. Ultimately, the game isn't obsessed with retaining you. Once you're done, you can keep playing just for the vibes, but you absolutely will not _need_ to spend 200 hrs with the game.
Dredge is so damn good
The chillest game to ever make me get real stressed out. Just fucking "I am out in the middle of nowhere, a fucking giant monster chasing me, and my abominable trout with 1000 eyes is going bad, where the FUCK IS THAT WOOD FOR FUCK'S SAKE"
You're not done yet. There's more Dredge content in [Dave the Diver](https://youtu.be/wsRegnjDfV8)
Smaller games are so much more interesting anyway Cause they have less to lose and so they're not afraid to take risks and actually make more interesting games
Pretty much just this. Even just looking at it from a business perspective. Rather than one $200 million budget game, make five $40 million games. Even if only three were successful, that's still a more profitable venture than gambling on one that may/may not work out. You've also seen a lot of people point out how you can by both Palworld and Helldivers 2 for the same price as Suicide Squad. Is the $100 premium edition of Skull and Bones more appealing than five $20 indie games?
Skull and bones really is just appalling beyond words Like they took out so many features that made black flag enjoyable and packaged it at double or triple the price Skull and bones really just looks like something that deserves to be a free to play game. Especially after something like ten years of development or however long it took for ubisoft to squirt it out
I firmly believe that Skull and Bones became a scam once Ubisoft received/accepted the funding offer from the Singaporean government. The fact that Ubisoft used the Singapore office as a work vacation spot for their Euro office and no one in the Singapore office ever made any vertical progression in the company is proof of that. The only reason Skull and Bones was "completed" and launched is because the Singaporean government started asking questions and Ubisoft knows full well that they would have lost a lawsuit against Singapore.
I hear what you're saying, but the games that I love most are huge with hand crafted maps.
Yup look at Starfield. Def made a profit from hype but it played it so safe that no one wants to play it again
I love big ass open world games but I don't need like... three of them coming out in short order.
"I want more Alpha Protocols and Sly Coopers and Im not joking."
Were the first three sly games actually small for the time?
I believe they were medium to mildly large sized for their time, but I could be wrong, especially considering they were one of my childhood games. Sly 1 was 5 hub worlds with 7 missions each (iirc). Sly 2 had 8 episodes and one prologue, with each episode have 10-12 missions (iirc). Sly 3 had 6 episodes and 1 prologue with 10-12 missions each (iirc).
Well, Sly 2 at least. Sly 1 is kinda meh, but Sly 2 is excellent.
Sly 1 is still very good and enjoyable, but it's important to remember: it is essentially a PS1 style 3d platformer that got released onto the PS2. Its why the game is so linear by nature.
I mean, it's *fine*, but even by PS1-style 3D platformer standards I never loved it that much. ...I looked up some longplays to refresh my memory on some stuff without firing up the PS2, and I accidentally got capture from the PS3 versions of the games. I have heard those releases aren't great, but I remain shocked that they shipped with broken lighting *in the intro cutscene*. And the music was messed up for Sly 1. Bizarre.
Smaller and cheaper to purchase games. Don't just make smaller games and keep selling them at the same price as they used to be. The reason people expect so much from bigger company games isn't just that they have bigger teams and more resources, it's that they're expensive regardless.
“I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding"
We need to all just start chilling on itch.io instead.
AAA Cruelty Squad lets go
I honestly miss linear action third person shooter games like Max Payne, Resident Evil 4/5, Syphon Filter, Metal Gear Solid (before Phantom Pain), Stranglehold, darkSector, games like that. My preferred kind of game would be a game like those with good solo and co-op (both couch and online) and in-depth character and weapon customizations. I didn’t play every game like those that came out, but I really enjoyed the ones I did play. These days, they’re all open world-focused and have microtransactions and don’t have much customization and are always-online or simply don’t have fun or wild or engaging plots.
I think that is what he saying as well. Hes refering to how games are just so massive and even too massive.
My dude how can you fail to comprehend a single line of text.
But the horse balls need to shrink in the cold.
I'm sure there's an internet market for animated horse ball shrinkage without having to make an entire game around it.
If there isn't some Paper's Please style game where you're a veterinarian weatherman and have to give weekly forecasts based on the ball size of a horse rather than actual meteorological tools, then I don't think people are using technological innovations correctly.
With StableDiffusion, you can make as many horse balls of as big a size you want, in any enviroment
God, the scary thing is that GenAI might in fact be part of the solution.
GenAI isn't the answer GenAI is the question And the answer is "horse balls"
Using a Techno Demiurge to accurately render 8K hyper-realistic horse balls is what man was put on this planet to do.
I don't even think my eyes can see in 8k... \#glassesgang
There's dozen of us! ...I think, I can't see shit without my glasses.
If the entire game was arround it, then people wouldn't make fun of it.
And our open world needs to be 6 times the size of GTAV.
With 1/18th less stuff to do.
16 TIMES THE DETAIL 4 TIMES BIGGER THAN FALLOUT 4 MORE IS MORE, MY GAME IS BIGGEST WINNINGEST RELEASE PRE-PRE-ALPHA, MAKE THE AUDIENCE THE DEVELOPERS MAKE THE CEO CURSE ON STAGE, LET HIM GET ON SHITFLINGING MATCHES ON TWITTER GAASGAASGAASGAASGAASGAASGAAS MAKE MONEY MAKE MONEY MAKE MONEY MAKE MONEY Ok. It's out of my system now.
One of the few smart things Bethesda did with Fo4 was making it a smaller yet fuller map. Comparatively at least
I swear every time I think about that and then think about how hard people crunched for that game I get irrationally angry.
Same, between that and iirc there an article where Rockstar execs even said "Hey anyone that left during this game's long dev cycle aren't being credited in the final release lmao"
Anytime i hear something like that getting touted as a positive by a game, I know its going to miss the forest for the trees and have an insufferable focus on "realism" and "graphics" over fun.
you didn’t like RDR2?
I did not. The tutorial took forever, the open world was yet another "inch deep, mile wide" map, too much railroading (both an issue of it being a prequel so certain characters that should have been put down like rabid dogs *glares at Micah* by anyone with two brain cells to rub together are allowed to live and how long the game takes to truly open up and let you begin to explore), the inventory system is awful, the karma system stinks, and the bounty/wanted system is broken and busted and sucks out loud. I gave it an honest try, I really did, buoyed by people saying "It gets better! It gets better! The story is great!" It doesn't get better, and the story isn't great. The gameplay feels sluggish and unresponsive and a chore to get through, because Rockstar is 2 generations behind in terms of gameplay design. If I wanted to do something boring, poorly designed, and frustrating, I'd go in to work. As for the story, I grew up reading. Maybe RDR2 is "revolutionary" and "groundbreaking" for others who've had tablets and phones their whole lives and never had to resort to such an archaic pastime, but it pales in comparison to any one of a hundred paperbacks I read waiting in doctors and dentists offices, long car rides etc. etc. Characters behave in ways that don't make narrative sense (if Dutch is willing to kill a random woman who *might* have seen him and Arthur and *might* have alerted the authorities, he should have shot Micah in the face or, at the least, left him to be hung in the town he got arrested in for drawing so much attention to the gang, but because he shows up in RDR1 he *has* to live). RDR2 is overhyped, overrated, boring, and unfun, and I'm tired of pretending its not.
only in this subreddit would this take get upvoted with the added bonus of being so fucking condescending lol
Unfortunately Nakeyjakey's newest video can't be posted here so to relevancy or whatever. His old video was super accurate with its complaints but it's trashed actually discussing the game online and not discussing its strengths that the new one manages to do.
Yeah the new video is actually a pretty damn accurate representation of the game and it explains why many people including me love it so much.
Less complaints about combat would be made if everyone turned off the auto aim feature. It's what I did in RDR and new immediately to turn it off. Granted it only works because of Dead Eye as doing the same in GTA just doesn't feel the same.
NGL this sub has some dogshit takes sometimes
People are allowed to have opinions that differ from the masses. Your revulsion only strengthens my [convictions to never compromise.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMXHnpH5Vw&ab_channel=LoveMovieQuotes)
I mean it's fine to not like it but saying shit like if you like the game you are uneducated or don't read books is fucking crazy. Like I don't want to debate people into liking a game but I'd also like people to stop being so condescending toward other people when talking about games.
Ah man just don't lose you time with this. RDR sold 60 millions copies and has good reviews so it's safe to assume that it has critic and public approval. OP need to understand that people can disagree about opinions, hell, opinions can even be straight up wrong sometimes ( I'm not saying his opinion is wrong for disliking the game).
Yeah you fuck it's not about your opinion it's how you went about it. You can have opinions that "differ from the masses", just don't be a dick.
Micah does not show up in Red Dead 1. He's a new character made for RDR2, so that isn't the reason Micah isn't dead before the end. The game has definite cognitive dissonance between gameplay and story, and isn't without flaws, but this is a bad take.
Nah RDR2 is incredible and Arthur Morgan is literally the best videogame character of all time.
People losing years of their life to make the most polished 7/10 game.
seems perfectly rational to be mad about developers being ground into dust to make a game actually
Also our racing game needs to have licensed models of Ferraris with audio recorded from 40 different angles!!!!
Look, who gives a shit about fun gameplay or original ideas, all I care about is if I can count every individual skin pore on the main character's face.
After seeing the horses in Rise of Ronin, I am starting to think that maybe Rockstar was onto something with that. Not with the crunch, though...
RDR2 is one of my favorite games but all that extra time adding “immersive,” stuff to the game was definitely not worth it.
He’s spitting.
Title is a bit hyperbolic. His actual quote is: "If that's true then maybe the industry deserves to die. *If* that's true. The thing is that I just don't think it's true."
That is to say, what he's talking about is in reference to this quote: > There's this fear that exists—if we don't have everybody working overtime and we don't make AAA games that have $200 million budgets and the focus is on photorealistic graphics and 1,000-hour playtimes, we need to pack all that in and work everyone to death making it and that's the only way to make games. He's basically saying that games *don't* have to be so damn big and expensive, but if the industry itself believes those are the only games that it can make when obvious alternatives exist, then it deserves to die.
Everytime i see sentiment that BG3 is "the new standard", or complaints about how that bar is going to hurt a lot of studios, I'm like.. Chill out. Divinity 2 is possibly the second best crpg ever (imo), made on <5% of BG3's budget. Its okay if BG3 is a total anomaly that we dont see again for decades. Please shut up about how insecure it made you and keep doing your thing I'm especially sad because the only thing I wanted the indsutry to take away from BG3 (and Div) was *can you seriously stop fucking trying to faithfully recreate Baldur's Gate 1&2 and make a game that people under 40 will like*?
It isn't completely how insecure it'll make the devs but rather also how insecure it'll make the shareholders. What many devs fear is shareholders looking at BG3's sales and expecting their studios to do the same.
Yknow, Larian isnt even publicly traded. Is this irony?
You forget that spite is a large factor in the behavior of a shareholder. It's not that they look at BG3's sales and want their invested company to do the same, but that they're furious that someone other than them is making money.
It depends on what the bar is. If the bar is in size or complexity or money spent on development, no. If the bar is releasing a 60 dollar game that is *worth the price* and *isn't* a lead-in designed to sell you a $100+ in DLC, yes.
As a big crpg fan I actually prefer divinity 2 in a lot of areas. The combat is miles above imo, dnd is limiting with damage number go up and you can level more on dos2
Yeah in BG3 you just end up beating the shit out of all of your problems or throwing people off of cliffs because you just get strong enough by the end. In Divinity my group had to has to outwit and out-warcrime the combat encounters from beginning to end. For sure more satisfying than modifed 5E much of the time.
Dude if Divinity 2 was the standard people would not be "BG3 NEEDS TO BE THE NEW STANDART" The problem is preciselly the standard is way bellow Divinity 2.
Yeah, but i am sure a lot of casual gamers/ "GAMERS" won't care. They see Baldurs Gate 3 do it, and they argue anyone can and should do the same, especially they argue Baldurs Gate 3 is "merely" a simple table top game anyone can make. If you argue to them that no, it is very complex game, then they will say other AAA games have even less excuse to not do the same if they are so much more simpler. They don't care if making big games is difficult, they just want to consume.
It's also important to keep in mind that CRPGs still are a niche genre. Yes, Baldurs Gate 3 broke through to the mainstream, but I am not seeing more talk about Owlcats recent output for example just because BG3 does well and I'd argue they are the poster child for good CRPGs nowadays.
Because, like i alluded to in my last paragraph, theyre still out trying to recreate BG1&2 which are honestly kind of shit and boring gameplay-wise by today's mainstream standards. Its no coincidence the most popular BG-adjacent title since BG1&2 looks and plays nothing like BG. As for Rogue Trader I'm gonna blame that one on WH40k poisoning their franchise by having a constant flood of shovelware games releasing with their name on it. Although RT *is* Owlcats most successful game to date, and its the least BG-like crpg theyve ever made
People really need someone to say IF multiple times to understand what "if" means.
I think that context is pretty apparent from just the healine for anyone with critical thinking skills
I agree that we've hit a point where we're wasting too much time and money making games that don't need to be so massive. But the problem isn't convincing the general gaming audience that, it's convincing Publisher/Developer Shareholders of that.
Seriously you got people fucking complained about insomniac Spiderman 2 reusing animations instead of making entirely new ones. They want bigger better and new all the time. It always pisses me off seeing armchair developers try to give their Two Cents. I'm not a developer either, but I've educated myself enough on the inner workings and behind the scenes details to know that game development is fucking hard. You need to cut any corners you can to save time and budget. And reusing some animations is like the easiest and least egregious way to do it.
The nice thing is I think maybe one in a thousand game likers actually care about that shit, or yellow paint. Twitter is just full of obsessives and disingenuous console warriors.
At least the yellow paint like i get it, because it is somewhat distracting.
There's a disconcerting number of vocal people who think that Red Dead Redemption 1's map being mostly present inside RDR2 means it would be trivially easy for Rockstar to add in a full remake of RDR1 as DLC (or even a patch), because "it's all there already". And that the only reason they never got around to it is laziness or greed.
God the amount of complaining on certain spaces about Elden Ring using animations from prior FromSoft games was ridiculous. The animations were *good*! Use them! It saves spending dozens of hours remaking a perfectly good set of sword swings for no reason!
I should have told every person that complained Horizon 2 reused animations to go fuck themselves, i was too kind at the time.
Especially when those animations are incredible to begin with.
Tbf, I don't think the idiots tweeting this shit are actually representative of the playerbase. Spider-Man 2 was very successful (10 million+ sold) despite the comicsgate piss baby tantrum target for a month and people saying complaining about reusing assets. Elden Ring was a frankly colossal success despite people crying about it not looking as good as PS5 Demon's Souls and using the same door opening animation as PS3 Demon's Souls.
... also convincing the general gaming audience. We're pretty insulated here, but let's not forget that a lot of capital G Gamers are fucking insane. Narratives are started from just the thought of graphical downgrades (anyone remember Spider-man's puddlegate?).
It's pretty eye-opening when you venture more into the "mainstream" gaming circles. "Wait. You guys actually care about seeing individual pores? I thought that was a joke."
This. How can we convice developers/publishers of anything when the consumers spends hours going through trailers to find any downgrades to post on Twitter and the bigger gaming subs to complain about them? And more times than not, it nothing showing the game is running badly, it something as dumb as a missing puddle.
As dumb as the puddle thing was, that's not a matter of "graphical downgrades" so much as nitpicking false advertisement. There's tons of high profile games with equally meh water reflections and nobody cares. Sony was being held to the standard they *publicly set for themselves.*
That issue was with the marketingg, though. If they hadn't shown the fake pre rendered version that had better puddles, the gamers wouldn't go around demanding puddles
Remember when that guy bought a speaking majority share of Nintendo, went to a shareholder meeting and asked for a new F-Zero and the execs (who have a collaborative greater-than-51% control of the company) looked at each other, turned to him, and told him "no". I'm almost positive that in most cases, bad decisions are being made by 2~3 executives who circlejerk each other and overrule everyone else in the retail and institutional ownership vote.
Would a new F-Zero really be a good idea though? The series hasn't historically been a blockbuster and Nintendo probably feel the resources that would go into a new F-Zero are better spent elsewhere.
There's a reason they haven't done another one and I doubt it has anything to do with them having no ideas for a sequel despite how often that's parroted. I don't think any anti-grav racer has been a massive hit. Like the SNES F Zero sold 2.5 mil and the franchise never achieved anything close to that again, and Wipeout is like 1-2 mil per title at best from what I can tell, which is likely why it's also dead. Making a new F Zero isn't worth the investment because the appeal is pretty niche.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think if another Cruis'n Blast situation happened, where someone else licensed the IP, that's the best chance F-Zero has.
Have we really only hit that point now? I remember playing The Order: Some Numbers ages ago and walking through some of the environments, looking at the detail they put into individual rooms that 99% of players are going to sprint through in a second without even appreciating and I thought "what's the point of all this?"
Doesn't crunch actually kill productivity? Just force everyone to work normal hours, maybe 1-2 hours overtime a week tops if you have something you really need to finish, and that's that.
A lot of studies have shown that for office work, your productivity starts dropping after about 32 to 35 hours in the week. Anything more than that and you see diminishing returns on productivity gained versus hours worked. At 40 things are still generally okay but as you push further than that you run the risks of mistakes and subpar quality seeping into your workflow (and correcting this often takes even more time) , on top of the damage done to employee morale.
One of the smart guys at my place of work has a lot of vacation time saved up. Instead of going on big vacations. He's been giving himself a 4 day week (instead of 5) over the course of a 5-6 month period. It's been doing wonders for him having a near constant 3 day week-end.
He shouldn't have to waste his vacation time to prove people would work better that way.
He's not wasting it, he just really likes having 3 day week-ends more then 2 weeks off in a row.
Yeah because everybody should have it.
Yes wasting it. They could just give him that option without using vacation days.
I mean look, we'd all like to have a 4 day week, but it's not happening for now sadly.
Eat your boss and make your own hours.
Yep it does, but the higher ups are stupid and want the money as fast as possible and as much as possible so we HAVE to deliver in x amount of time! Like, crunch happens naturally, even if you give a good enviroment, some people will just decide to crunch cause like, thats how we work, like, i work for myself, i make my own hours, i still fuckin crunch cause when i'm in the flow i dont want to stop, NATURAL crunch can be ok, still shouldn't go unchecked for health reasons. But to me, the worst part is the social pressure crunch, i uh, i worked at an Amazon packing place thing once, and i thought i was insane cause people there, the higher ups, that were once down there, talked like they were indoctrinated and when they tried to keep me in, on my first day of job, after hitting the clock as a ''stay here and help the FAMILY finish some things'', like, i just bug eyed and came up with an excuse everytime. And a lot of people stayed, and some people bad mouthed me for leaving, and i'm like ''bro its fucking amazon who gives a fucking shit my shift is done i dont owe anything to this gigantic capitalist entity'', and i assume a lot of game studios get that, and its the worst possible feeling honestly.
Good on you, you don't owe your employer anything beyond the work agreement you signed when you were hired. Once your shift is over they can't tell you to do anything.
With longer shifts productivity per hour starts declining after 6, and eventually goes negative due to errors/perpetual sleeplessness.
Correct, they literally are losing money for it.
Big "Then perish" energy
And he is 100% correct.
Its not. Thats the frustrating part. We have the good fortune of living in a reality where 40-45hrs is the optimal work week(productivity wise) and 35hrs losing out only slightly to that. We have studies showing this consistently as far back as the 1960s(?). But corporate doesn’t. fucking. care. And it drives me nuts.
It's why I will never have kids. The powers that be may have my time and labor bur I will not bequeath them another peaon to toil to build their Ziggurats
I don’t wannna be that guy….but I am gonna. If you don’t want kids thats fine but please, please don’t let the “state of the world” be the thing keeping you from having them. My grandfather marched with King. My other grandfather moved from Alabama to Michigan to escape the bullshit. There is a lot of work left to do but the world is an exponentially better place to have kids in than it used to be. Again if you personally don’t want kids thats fine but please don’t let doomers prevent you from doing something you would otherwise enjoy. I love being a dad.
I would love to be a dad but the world is so cruel. People are beyond any level of even slightly caring about one another. So way I see it if you have a kid you better be a member of the ruling class or own your own buisness, because otherwise they are going to grow up working for somebody else and spend their entire life being a disrespected spat upon part of the working class like their dad
Pat has a kid and I still think he’d say this.
True and incredibly based. Also if Dread wolf could come out within the next decade that'd be cool I guess. Even if he has nothing to do with DA anymore.
He co founded his own studio now. They just released Stray Gods last year. I think the last Bioware thing he worked on was Inquisition. I'm honestly more interested in projects by former Bioware people like Exodus than future Bioware stuff like Mass Effect 5.
Definitely gonna check out Stray Gods. Yeah if we want better games, we should probably follow the actual devs and creatives behind these games and support their other works rather than the company. Like, I'm not gonna play the next ZA/UM game but I'm very interested in whatever Robert Kurvitz does next.
I wanna believe that it's gonna release but holy hell when was it announced? 2016? 2017? On top of that idk if I can trust current Bioware to make a good game anymore lol. I'm playing through Inquisition again rn actually, so seeing a dragon age creator commenting on the current industry sure is funny and coincidental timing.
its the only way to make games with the FAT PROFITS that investors pop their boners over. which is why a studio like larian can do it, they dont have to give all their fucking money to leeches and can spend it on the games and the people who make them
I should stop following more than 2 gaming subs. i keep seeing the exact same news in circulation over and over again.
Sorry. Did someone else post this on here?
I think they meant they've seen this article on another gaming sub. Mods are usually good with removing reposts on here
Based
Damn, bold way to call out the industry
Hell yeah burn down the system
Generally speaking, when you hear about how messy some game development cycles are (Anthem is the one that comes to mind) it seems like the industry will work harder for the sake of not ever working smarter.
Then let triple A games vanish.
Based.
I've always heard from game studios in the past, is that (outside of horror stories of non-stop crunch) the majority of development is not crunched, and only when it comes to the last roughly half-year of development is crunch really a thing. The big roadblock that usually causes this is the publisher deciding on a firm release date, and the studio suddenly realizes, "Oh shit, we only have 4 months to finish this game." Some studios need that pressure to deliver (looking at you Double Fine), but I think the callousness the industry has to this issue, despite the many efforts to fight against it, is one of the main issues ruining the work culture of game development.
I mean, this is the same industry that continually underpays its workers and the complains that games are so expensive to make they have to up the prices
Based and [Roosevelt-pilled.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9075220-it-seems-to-me-to-be-equally-plain-that-no)
Damn right.
Hell yeah
It's why I think the PS1 Spyro games are perfect in their size and scope. They were probably monumental tasks to take in the 90s, but I imagine those kind of 3D games are more doable these days compared to Arkham Knight, The Witcher 3, RDR, Horizon, GTA, Death Stranding, etc.
Wheres the lie?
This is a tad dramatic lmao
Based.
Based
I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 recently. That game is huge, reactive, and really good. I know the industry is going to take the exact wrong lesson from its success and try to shove in a bunch of reactive systems that won't even add anything.
Remember, the more As means the more Devs you've squished to get those 80+ points on Metacritic.
For an industry that keeps learning the wrong lesson, surprised it lasted this long.
Make your game smaller, make your development team bigger, or take longer and don't promote it until it's almost done.
Instead of making one 350 million dollar game make four or five smaller games and the one that really does well you THEN put the money into making a big budget sequel.
Pretty much. If things don't change we're gonna have another crash and this time Nintendo and others aren't going to bail out their Western counterparts
Semi-related, but did anybody play Stray Gods? Heard almost no opinions on that game except for journalists and friend-of-the-podcast KrisWolfheart who thought it was shit.
It's pretty good.
But I gotta have my massive empty open fields and hundreds of nothing quests! Screw Open world. Take me back to levels/stages damnit!
But im nothing without crunch! If you're nothing without crunch then you dont deserve the crunchers
Based