ampersandrew

This deal happened because Embracer is shedding debt, and this is how you shed it. They just listed their debt a few months ago as 2.12B, so this and Gearbox will go a long way toward getting it down to a level they can actually afford. Meanwhile, it’s very hard to track what they still own, but one of those things is Tomb Raider. They’ll also have tons and tons of smaller bets. Alone in the Dark, Titan Quest II, and Gothic look to still be under their control, for instance.

A few dozen hours of content over the course of a month; I don’t think it’s strange that the player count dropped substantially. Live service games just broke how people think about video games, and this isn’t a live service.

So what? Baldur’s Gate 3’s player base is about a tenth of what it used to be too. So is Elden Ring.

Volition surprised me by staying open as long as it did. It hadn’t made a hit since Saints Row IV, and it had several high profile flops since then. I would have loved for Free Radical to finish making a type of FPS that doesn’t get made anymore, but apparently they spent two years of that studio’s life chasing Fortnite.

You don’t detect it (at least not very well), and cheat hardware isn’t new.

Neither are guaranteed by the seller though. They could change their API tomorrow and break compatibility. Unlikely though that is, if they want my sale, they can do the work themselves rather than relying on an unofficial project with hooks into their store.

I’m on Linux, so if I buy from GOG, I don’t get cloud saves or automatic updates. If we had Galaxy on Linux, it would be my default store. But it’s not on Linux, so I shop on Steam.

I’m also not familiar enough with C&C to know what this game is doing different from C&C. But a lot of old designs aren’t broken and could just use modernization. Look at the last few games Mimimi has made, modernizing Commandos and Desperados. At this point, I’m desperate for “boomer shooters” to catch up to the 00s in design, because no one really makes FPS games like that anymore. A friend of mine was playing some TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on Discord, and I never played those games in their heyday, but I would absolutely be into them. There just aren’t games made like that anymore, and I miss them. This game could be that for RTS or C&C fans.

Side note. There are allegedly TimeSplitters and Perfect Dark games on the way. I fully expect Perfect Dark’s campaign to not resemble that first game at all and for its multiplayer to be a live service extraction shooter, because that’s what these big companies think people want. To be clear, this is based on nothing but feelings, conjecture, and cynicism, and I’m usually not very cynical. And if TimeSplitters ever does come back like they say it is, I expect it to be exactly what I want because they can’t afford to build the thing that’s going to ruin Perfect Dark.

As for BG3, the way Larian makes those games systems driven, such that you can say, “I wonder if this works” and it usually does, is doing more than just playing on nostalgia, and it is doing things that video games excel at, even if it’s still doing things outlined in the tabletop game.

It’s modern enough but old school. I had barely sampled C&C back in the day (this game, I’m told, is a lot like C&C3), but I played a ton of StarCraft, and the mission they gave on the show floor was definitely great for showing off the unit escalation and rock paper scissors of it all. If you’re looking for another one of those, there’s a good chance they nailed it. For me, however, I think I’d like to see a different take on the genre, at least for multiplayer. The fog of war would instill a sense of dread in me that no amount of scouting could ever alleviate, and while winning a game of an RTS is super empowering, losing felt so awful that I’m not sure I want to do it again. They’re seemingly not changing anything drastic and just making another one of those, which is fine, because there aren’t a lot of those. I’m much less interested in playing games with a mouse these days, but somehow this game has full controller support listed on the store page. I know AOE2 got updated with clever controller options, but like I said; they’re not rocking the boat with this game, so it’s surprising that they somehow have controller inputs working. When I played the demo, it was on a mouse and keyboard.

What do you mean by format? I played it at PAX.

I can’t speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don’t have texture bugs and T posing. I’m glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I’m also not sure how you went from, “Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying” to “Of course it will have bugs!”

Fine. I don’t play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don’t expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you’d recognize no matter how into football you are.

EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.

Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make.

I don’t know where you got that figure, but it sounds very outdated. I expect each iteration of Madden to cost several times that to produce. Video games are also a very scalable product to sell, so your margin comparison to a product sold on Amazon is not apt. Avengers and Forspoken had negative profit margins, for instance, because the economics of selling those things is very different than a product on Amazon.

And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts.

The business model has always affected the game design at every step in the medium’s history. We used to have quarter-guzzling arcade games as the primary way games were made. Crypto and NFTs aren’t taking; it was a bubble that burst just like tulip bulbs and beanie babies. Other business models have come and gone in games before, like subscription MMOs and “project $10” online passes.

Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on.

That is, in fact, a choice that everyone has.

Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.

You take that power away by voting with your wallet though. EA just had its ass handed to them via BattleBit, delivering the game that fans actually wanted, not to mention Baldur’s Gate 3 outdoing the last number of efforts from EA’s own BioWare. Voting with your wallet isn’t an overnight process, and often enough, it brings corporations down.

I suppose I implied but didn’t explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There’s an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it’s well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don’t think it’s just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that’s to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.

You voting with your wallet does not mean that your vote wins every time. Madden might still exist even if you don’t buy it. But at least you can direct the money you would have spent on it elsewhere, to someone who needs it more.

I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.

It doesn’t even really have to go anywhere except having new characters in a new city. There aren’t a ton of crime story settings in video games these days, let alone GTA’s brand of it.

Hey, feel free to put some money on the line and call me a fortune teller when this game comes out profitable. Nothing is guaranteed, but a new GTA game, especially after GTA V, is about the closest thing to guaranteed success you’ll see in this industry.