ampersandrew

joined 1 year ago
[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

I'm questioning if there's ever been a good D&D video game adaptation that wasn't trying its best to just replicate the tabletop experience, and then I'd ask if it's worth trying when you could just continue to make good replications of the tabletop experience.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 11 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

And hopefully they do away with those unlocks being tied to a server of theirs.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

From the press releases at the time, it appears the new owners only have the studio and the Hi-Fi Rush IP, not their other IPs like Ghostwire or Evil Within. If they had to be choosy, Hi-Fi Rush was the one worth getting.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I think I'm kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn't even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I've seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want "handcrafted levels" as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven't seen it done well if they've only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

How did you feel about Baldur's Gate 3? Because the structure of the maps in the first two Witcher games are what most of the genre is like.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 61 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Well, The Witcher 1 and 2 weren't open world, and those turned out pretty well, especially 2. There's something to be said about what a game from them might gain by doing more in a smaller world.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don't really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it's still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want "the next big thing". That thing at the time was "metaverse". MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they'll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).

As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don't buy but also what you do buy.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 28 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Always has been.

There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you'd have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite's DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 23 points 2 days ago

Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there's no reason it can't work that way again. It's one of several ways to satisfy the petition.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I agree. They've had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.

 

You can see the writing on the wall for FairGame$ and Marathon from a mile away, and this can't possibly instill confidence in the people still working there.

 

Also noteworthy that not only are PS5 sales behind PS4, but the PlayStation's competition has almost entirely disappeared, and that hasn't resulted in more PlayStations sold.

 

Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and he will be the fifth co-owner when he comes back from Disney World. Blight Club and Grubb's morning news show sound like they are returning this coming week. This PAX panel is officially episode #889 of the Giant Bombcast.

 

“We think there’s a large audience for compelling stories that don’t require massive time commitments,” 2K president David Ismailer said in a statement. “We’re excited to offer a game like Mafia: The Old Country in our portfolio, and to provide a linear highly-polished narrative experience that can easily complement the other more persistent games our players also love and engage with on a more consistent basis.”

So wait, is this that thing where AAA publishers think shorter, linear action games are inherently worth less than shitty bloated open world games? Like how Hi-Fi Rush was $30 and Redfall was $70? I mean, I'm not complaining about it costing less, but it's so weird, if so. Going by the store page, it seems like you do have to travel places, implying open world in some capacity, but maybe just a small open world? Cynically, is this them pricing a game lower than usual that they know is bad?

EDIT: Confirmed via FAQ, this is a linear action game and not open world. Optimistically: great! Most open world games don't make great use of it, and I'm here for the crime story anyway. Pessimistically: there's a good chance they salvaged a bad open world game into a wonky feeling linear game with open world vestiges, like Ride to Hell: Retribution, and the low price is to just get any kind of return on a project that produced a bad video game. I hope it's the former!

 

May 26, 2026

 

Xbox first party titles expected to hit $80 USD this holiday; Game Pass pricing currently unchanged.

 

Other than what they explicitly call out as a change to address criticisms of Borderlands 3, I don't know what this does differently from Borderlands 3, but I really like what I see. This looks great.

 

I've been playing through the Borderlands games for the first time lately and really enjoying them. I should be through the Pre-Sequel and 3 by then. Also, there's probably something we can infer about the GTA 6 release date from this, given the leak that Mafia: The Old Country comes out August 8th.

 
  1. Larian is working on two games right now and restructuring the company around making both of those projects flow.
  2. They've got a new narrative team meant to improve the work processes of detecting issues with player reactivity in complex RPGs.
  3. Vincke has a lot to say about machine learning, and it's somehow both vague and nuanced. He sees it as a way to speed up development on certain tasks, particularly prototyping and detecting problems that come up from iteration and changes, without replacing the need for handcrafted content.
  4. For some reason, we're still talking about "single player games are dead" discourse, even though Larian made the Best Multiplayer Game of 2023 and single player games are demonstrably, all the time, not dead.
  5. At least #4 led to an interesting discussion about how to lead a sustainable game business, including how to manage your "S" growth curve with more innovation. Mostly, Vincke summarizes it as "happy player, happy business", which you might have surmised from his Game Awards speech.
  6. Then there's some pretty low-hanging fruit when it comes to interacting with a game's community that's difficult to argue with, like "embrace mods that put your characters in other games".
  7. Vincke says the team finds DLC boring to make, so they don't really want to make it anymore.
  8. As far as what Larian's actually doing next, with the interviewer Tamoor Hussain keeping it to things that Vincke will actually answer, Vincke is hoping to make a pipeline over the next 5 years where they can get multiple RPGs in development at the same time smoothly. About as close as we'll get to a timeline on their next game is that Vincke says his wife will divorce him if their next game isn't out 5 years from now.
 

Prices for accessories will be increasing to compensate for tariffs.

 

"Europe" also includes the UK. It's worth noting that GTA 6 will move a lot of PS5s when it releases.

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