Community MetaSteam | February 2024 - Let's bring democracy into the zone with love
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I'm aware of Dimps working on FB, I was not really sure who made the last 2 SAO games. I said mixed bag because they also worked on Dragon Ball Breakers and that was sort of liked but also didn't do very well it would seem. I'd consider that mixed.
Cool now you can play both 1 and 2 on PC.
Probably means nothing, I just liked Bloodborne's existence being acknowledged for once lol.
I'd love to be able to buy The Darkness and Uncharted 1,2 and 3.
really bizarre to see this in 2024. how long has this been in development? Could this be one of the last remaining EGS exclusivity deals signed in 2019 or whenever?
Damn, that SMTV announcement really made my day. Fucking finally!
And Shadow of Erdtree looks fantastic.
And Shadow of Erdtree looks fantastic.
So far only confirmed for Switch and PS4/PS5. No PC version of this was announced.
The official site for the game has Valve/Steam copyright notices down at the bottom so I'd think it's coming for Steam as well and they're waiting for NISA to announce it or some shit.
Ooh The Darkness. Yeah, good one. Condemned 1, as well. Or wait, actually looking it up just now it seems it was Condemned 2 that never came to PC.
or maybe it's first run
100% of nothing is... let me get out my calculator... nothing.
still waiting for Decapolice.
And not Nintendo Direct related but it's kind of weird no more Slitterhead news for months.
_
DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT DLC Goku's Next Journey is out.
And not Nintendo Direct related but it's kind of weird no more Slitterhead news for months.
_
DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT DLC Goku's Next Journey is out.
for those too lazy to click the Twitter embed, it points to an Eurogamer article:
Elden Ring boss discusses Bloodborne remake, benefits of waiting for new hardware
FromSoft boss Hidetaka Miyazaki has discussed the possibility of a Bloodborne remake, and the benefits of waiting for n…
www.eurogamer.net
they also ran two more articles:
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp)
Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki on originating the Soulslike genre
Eurogamer's interview with FromSoftware boss and Elden Ring's legendary director, Hidetaka Miyazaki.
www.eurogamer.net
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp)
Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree is FromSoftware's "largest expansion" ever
Elden Ring DLC expansion Shadow of the Erdtree finally has a release date: 21st June.
www.eurogamer.net
———
And regarding World of Goo 2; I just searched a bit to see if there is any info why the went with EGS, and stumbled across an article/interview with the devs, done by John Walker (formely of Rock Paper Shotgun, who recently criticized Steam for lack of curation).... for the EGS news blog (which I didnt know existed, but then again, I am completely unaware of basically anything this company does except when one of you lot mention them here in the wrong thread
)Interview: World of Goo’s triumphant return will feature flowing gloopy oozy goo
2.21.2024
By John Walker, Contributor
In 2008, the gaming world changed. With the release of a single game, all the parameters shifted, and the lines between indie and AAA gaming began their inexorable blur. The game was 2D Boy’s World of Goo, one of the greatest puzzle games ever made. Now, over 15 years later, the two original creators are joined by a small team to make a sequel, which is coming to the Epic Games Store. How come?! Why now?! Well, we tracked down Ron Carmel, Kyle Gabler, and their new teammates to demand answers.
World of Goo was unlike anything seen before (apart from prototype Tower of Goo, but let’s not get pedantic). It stood out, not just for its unique mechanic—where animated blobs formed rigid bonds when placed near one another, creating structures along which other blobs could move—but for its astonishing presentation, combining bold, cartoon graphics with an exquisite score and (perhaps most importantly) a fascinating storyline that unfolded across four distinct chapters.
This was a game that began with a brilliant, compelling idea, and then threw it aside to introduce another—which then would be abandoned because an even better idea was coming along. Each mechanic was good enough to be its own game, but World of Goo had the confidence to incessantly iterate and surprise. It was also a game that grew its own legends, like how the two people who made it used a Starbucks as their office, their laptops as their studio.
Of course, this wasn’t a singular moment, but rather a confluence of events that kicked off a seismic shift. Only a year prior, Valve started allowing third-party games to be sold through Steam—2008 saw just 179 games released on the platform—so visibility for new releases was enormous.
This also meant that it was, for the first time, realistic to launch a game without the support of a publisher, and possible to have a hit without relying on retail shelves. Games like Peggle had opened doors, creating an appetite in players for imaginative, low-budget puzzle games, and a very few brave indies had left breadcrumbs for others to follow—games like Vigil, Aquaria, and Gish.
And yet World of Goo felt revolutionary. It was a literal overnight success. The game raked in a fortune, and this essentially tiny indie game received mass coverage across all the big-name gaming sites that at the time routinely ignored games they didn’t hear about via a PR company. It made waves by shipping with no DRM, and then again when its developers posted that they weren’t at all bothered by an estimated 90% piracy rate. They even ran an amnesty sale a year later that allowed people who’d pirated to pay what they thought the game was worth, and brought in a further $100,000 in a week.
So you might wonder, what game did 2D Boy make next? Well…they didn’t. That was it. Kyle Gabler went on to release games with his new studio, Tomorrow Corporation, and Ron Carmel co-launched the Indie Fund. But until now, 2D Boy has been a one-hit wonder, and it seemed like that would be it, forever. Until now.
So why now?
“My knee makes a noise when I bend it,” explains Gabler. “If old age doesn’t destroy us first, AI is coming for us next. Soon, nobody will ever need to make games ever again, since computers will build custom pleasure palaces for us all.” Ahhhh. Should have guessed. “So,” continues Gabler, “before we become totally obsolete, we knew that if we ever wanted to visit World of Goo again—in that broken, hand-crafted, rickety, junkyard, human way we build stuff—this is our last chance.”
Of course, in reality, Gabler has kept his hand in. Tomorrow Corporation released Little Inferno, Human Resource Machine, and 7 Billion Humans. It’s Tomorrow Corporation that’s joining 2D Boy for the World of Goo sequel, although it sounds like the team’s expanding. “In those 15 years, each of us has become a parent,” says Gabler, “which has dramatically multiplied our productivity by 0.2 times! ‘I’m going to work!’ says my 4-year-old, as he shoves peanut butter fingers into my keyboard.”
Ron Carmel, meanwhile, went in some other directions. “I’ve been gradually moving away from the games industry,” he tells us. “After co-founding Indie Fund with a bunch of friends, I also became a dad, made [mobile strategy game] Subterfuge with Noel Llopis (who is now part of the World of Goo 2 team), trained and volunteered as a mediator, co-facilitated a men’s group in San Quentin prison, did a couple of years of somatic psychotherapy training, and then started seeing clients in private practice.”
All of which, you might imagine, could leave little time for games development. “It was during that training that Kyle and I started feeling out the idea of World of Goo 2,” Carmel explains, “So now I’m on the World of Goo 2 team part-time, and seeing clients part-time.”
I wondered if Kyle and Ron had any theories for why—aside from being a genuinely wonderful game—World of Goo was such a phenomenon. It deserved its success, but it’s fair to say the reaction was unlike anything a similar game would receive today.
“We were so lucky with the timing of World of Goo,” says Carmel. “Digital distribution was taking off, and I think there was hunger for weird and wonderful games that were different from the ‘hardcore games’ and ‘casual games’ that were available at the time.”
Carmel lists other games that were a part of the same movement, games that “didn’t fit into the incumbent market” as he puts it: Gish, Darwinia, Braid, Audiosurf, Fl0w, Spelunky, and Super Meat Boy. “Many of us proto-indies knew each other, or at least knew of each other. We were inspired by one another, hung out together at GDC and other events. There was a strong feeling of community. We had a feeling that something was happening and we were a part of it, but we really didn’t know what it was.”
“I remember getting together at Steve [Swink] and Matthew [Wegner]’s Flashbang office in Arizona,” Gabler interjects, “and Derek Yu was there—having already released Aquaria—and he was working on this new 2D platformer with procedural elements. None of us, even him, knew it was the beginning of the Spelunky phenomenon.”
This sense of camaraderie and change became so powerful that Carmel remembers getting carried away by it all. “I remember at some point thinking that AAA games were as good as dead, because now that making indie games was sustainable, everybody was going to quit their job and make indie games. Cute, right? I gave two or three talks around that time that were naive in different ways.”
The legend of World of Goo was that Gabler and Carmel made the game on their crappy laptops, sitting on either side of a small table in their local Starbucks. I wondered, now they’re bajillionaires, whether they were approaching the sequel in a similarly scrappy way.
“Well,” says Kyle, “this bajillionaire buys breakfast cereal based on maximizing ounces per dollar, and I never get the ‘extra avocado’ at Subway because it’s a really inefficient avocado delivery mechanism.” Ah. “I’ve also switched to using only free and open-source software, running Linux on a laptop where the ‘e’ and ‘9’ keys don’t work. So when it comes to whether or not to build World of Goo 2 in a scrappy way, it’s not really much of a decision. Scrappiness is how we do everything.”
“I use a Mac,” adds Ron.
“I don’t have a computer,” interrupts the game’s mysterious PR rep, Dandy Wheeler.
Carmel continues, “We knew that since we’re both old and have families, it would take forever to make a game, so we knew we needed to bring in help.”
“Even with a team, though,” adds Gabler, “World of Goo 2 wouldn’t work if we made it in a slick or expensive way. I think part of the fun of the game is its hand-crafted ‘Oh my god it could fall apart at any moment’ aesthetic. It’s all kind of duct-taped together, and I hope players enjoy that.”
Wheeler interrupts again, “This is why we don’t let developers talk to the press. What they mean to say is that World of Goo 2 is a stunning work of technological and artistic achievement."
Coming back to a game like World of Goo must be incredibly daunting. Its iterative nature, the endlessly changing conceits, suggest that they must have exhausted all their best ideas when making it. I wondered if this was off-putting, this need to at least match their best.
“We decided that if we revisited World of Goo, time should have passed there too, and we should revisit that world in a way that is more how we remember it, not how it actually was.” Which leads to the notion of, rather than trying to pick up where the old game left off, instead considering what World of Goo can be in 2024. “What can we do now that we couldn’t do before?” says Gabler.
The first big change in this regard is that World of Goo 2 will—for the first time—contain actual goo. “World of Goo had Goo Balls, and it had roughly simulated regions of water,” says Gabler. “But there was no flowing gloopy oozy goo. Computers are much faster now, so we’re able to create actual flowing, splashing, simulated goo.”
This led to experimentations with liquid physics, which the team decided should form a core part of the sequel. “And along the way,” Gabler adds, “we kept discovering other neat things we could do, and new species of Goo Balls, with new abilities, often interacting with liquid in some way. With a physics simulation, there’s always neat new stuff to discover.”
Given that there are more than two people making the game this time, that presumably means a lot of fresh ideas are also being introduced via fresh brains. So who are they? Alongside Ron and Kyle are programmers Noel Llopis, Aleš Mlakar, Miguel Ángel Pérez Martínez, and Allan Blomquist, artists Peter Hedin and Jay Epperson, designer Kyle Gray, and musician Jonny Trengrove. And, of course, Dandy Wheeler doing PR.
I wondered, given that the original game had everything from its programming, art, design and music created by Gabler and Carmel, whether they struggle with delegating now that there’s an extended team to work with.
“There’s not much delegation needed,” says Carmel. “People tend to just take stuff on and do amazing things. My opinion of myself as a programmer has taken a hit seeing what this team makes happen. It makes me feel even better about my personal transition.”
If anything, the pair are trying to bring in as much as they can from their crew. Carmel adds, “I love the way Kyle invites other people’s talents into the game. For example, Aleš plays flamenco guitar on one of the tracks!”
The side of World of Goo that perhaps gets mentioned less is that underpinning its cute puzzles and brilliant mechanics is a pretty furious commentary on capitalism. Given how well that’s been going over the last 15 years, I asked if they would pick up on that beef, or if there were other things they were angry about.
“We have so many beefs,” says Gabler. “I have to say, though, as a game designer I wish I could design something so clever as capitalism. It’s the reason cool stuff gets built cheaper over time. If no one bought stuff, we wouldn’t be able to get better and faster stuff all the time. And I love stuff! I think about this clip often.”
But yes, World of Goo 2 pokes some fun. “Sometimes they’re big themes in the game,” Gabler adds, “sometimes just passive-aggressive little swipes at things that annoy us, or silly things we love.”
So, does this mean the band’s back together? Can we expect a third and fourth album? Or is this a reunion tour?”
“I’m never making another game again,” says Ron, “so this one better be good.”
“This is Cher’s farewell tour,” offers Kyle. “I’m hoping we wring out all possible ideas into this game so we can’t possibly ever make another one.”
But the final word goes to PR rep Dandy Wheeler: “OK, you maudlin little indie developers. We all know you’ll come crawling back for more.”
2.21.2024
By John Walker, Contributor
In 2008, the gaming world changed. With the release of a single game, all the parameters shifted, and the lines between indie and AAA gaming began their inexorable blur. The game was 2D Boy’s World of Goo, one of the greatest puzzle games ever made. Now, over 15 years later, the two original creators are joined by a small team to make a sequel, which is coming to the Epic Games Store. How come?! Why now?! Well, we tracked down Ron Carmel, Kyle Gabler, and their new teammates to demand answers.
World of Goo was unlike anything seen before (apart from prototype Tower of Goo, but let’s not get pedantic). It stood out, not just for its unique mechanic—where animated blobs formed rigid bonds when placed near one another, creating structures along which other blobs could move—but for its astonishing presentation, combining bold, cartoon graphics with an exquisite score and (perhaps most importantly) a fascinating storyline that unfolded across four distinct chapters.
This was a game that began with a brilliant, compelling idea, and then threw it aside to introduce another—which then would be abandoned because an even better idea was coming along. Each mechanic was good enough to be its own game, but World of Goo had the confidence to incessantly iterate and surprise. It was also a game that grew its own legends, like how the two people who made it used a Starbucks as their office, their laptops as their studio.
Of course, this wasn’t a singular moment, but rather a confluence of events that kicked off a seismic shift. Only a year prior, Valve started allowing third-party games to be sold through Steam—2008 saw just 179 games released on the platform—so visibility for new releases was enormous.
This also meant that it was, for the first time, realistic to launch a game without the support of a publisher, and possible to have a hit without relying on retail shelves. Games like Peggle had opened doors, creating an appetite in players for imaginative, low-budget puzzle games, and a very few brave indies had left breadcrumbs for others to follow—games like Vigil, Aquaria, and Gish.
And yet World of Goo felt revolutionary. It was a literal overnight success. The game raked in a fortune, and this essentially tiny indie game received mass coverage across all the big-name gaming sites that at the time routinely ignored games they didn’t hear about via a PR company. It made waves by shipping with no DRM, and then again when its developers posted that they weren’t at all bothered by an estimated 90% piracy rate. They even ran an amnesty sale a year later that allowed people who’d pirated to pay what they thought the game was worth, and brought in a further $100,000 in a week.
So you might wonder, what game did 2D Boy make next? Well…they didn’t. That was it. Kyle Gabler went on to release games with his new studio, Tomorrow Corporation, and Ron Carmel co-launched the Indie Fund. But until now, 2D Boy has been a one-hit wonder, and it seemed like that would be it, forever. Until now.
So why now?
“My knee makes a noise when I bend it,” explains Gabler. “If old age doesn’t destroy us first, AI is coming for us next. Soon, nobody will ever need to make games ever again, since computers will build custom pleasure palaces for us all.” Ahhhh. Should have guessed. “So,” continues Gabler, “before we become totally obsolete, we knew that if we ever wanted to visit World of Goo again—in that broken, hand-crafted, rickety, junkyard, human way we build stuff—this is our last chance.”
Of course, in reality, Gabler has kept his hand in. Tomorrow Corporation released Little Inferno, Human Resource Machine, and 7 Billion Humans. It’s Tomorrow Corporation that’s joining 2D Boy for the World of Goo sequel, although it sounds like the team’s expanding. “In those 15 years, each of us has become a parent,” says Gabler, “which has dramatically multiplied our productivity by 0.2 times! ‘I’m going to work!’ says my 4-year-old, as he shoves peanut butter fingers into my keyboard.”
Ron Carmel, meanwhile, went in some other directions. “I’ve been gradually moving away from the games industry,” he tells us. “After co-founding Indie Fund with a bunch of friends, I also became a dad, made [mobile strategy game] Subterfuge with Noel Llopis (who is now part of the World of Goo 2 team), trained and volunteered as a mediator, co-facilitated a men’s group in San Quentin prison, did a couple of years of somatic psychotherapy training, and then started seeing clients in private practice.”
All of which, you might imagine, could leave little time for games development. “It was during that training that Kyle and I started feeling out the idea of World of Goo 2,” Carmel explains, “So now I’m on the World of Goo 2 team part-time, and seeing clients part-time.”
I wondered if Kyle and Ron had any theories for why—aside from being a genuinely wonderful game—World of Goo was such a phenomenon. It deserved its success, but it’s fair to say the reaction was unlike anything a similar game would receive today.
“We were so lucky with the timing of World of Goo,” says Carmel. “Digital distribution was taking off, and I think there was hunger for weird and wonderful games that were different from the ‘hardcore games’ and ‘casual games’ that were available at the time.”
Carmel lists other games that were a part of the same movement, games that “didn’t fit into the incumbent market” as he puts it: Gish, Darwinia, Braid, Audiosurf, Fl0w, Spelunky, and Super Meat Boy. “Many of us proto-indies knew each other, or at least knew of each other. We were inspired by one another, hung out together at GDC and other events. There was a strong feeling of community. We had a feeling that something was happening and we were a part of it, but we really didn’t know what it was.”
“I remember getting together at Steve [Swink] and Matthew [Wegner]’s Flashbang office in Arizona,” Gabler interjects, “and Derek Yu was there—having already released Aquaria—and he was working on this new 2D platformer with procedural elements. None of us, even him, knew it was the beginning of the Spelunky phenomenon.”
This sense of camaraderie and change became so powerful that Carmel remembers getting carried away by it all. “I remember at some point thinking that AAA games were as good as dead, because now that making indie games was sustainable, everybody was going to quit their job and make indie games. Cute, right? I gave two or three talks around that time that were naive in different ways.”
The legend of World of Goo was that Gabler and Carmel made the game on their crappy laptops, sitting on either side of a small table in their local Starbucks. I wondered, now they’re bajillionaires, whether they were approaching the sequel in a similarly scrappy way.
“Well,” says Kyle, “this bajillionaire buys breakfast cereal based on maximizing ounces per dollar, and I never get the ‘extra avocado’ at Subway because it’s a really inefficient avocado delivery mechanism.” Ah. “I’ve also switched to using only free and open-source software, running Linux on a laptop where the ‘e’ and ‘9’ keys don’t work. So when it comes to whether or not to build World of Goo 2 in a scrappy way, it’s not really much of a decision. Scrappiness is how we do everything.”
“I use a Mac,” adds Ron.
“I don’t have a computer,” interrupts the game’s mysterious PR rep, Dandy Wheeler.
Carmel continues, “We knew that since we’re both old and have families, it would take forever to make a game, so we knew we needed to bring in help.”
“Even with a team, though,” adds Gabler, “World of Goo 2 wouldn’t work if we made it in a slick or expensive way. I think part of the fun of the game is its hand-crafted ‘Oh my god it could fall apart at any moment’ aesthetic. It’s all kind of duct-taped together, and I hope players enjoy that.”
Wheeler interrupts again, “This is why we don’t let developers talk to the press. What they mean to say is that World of Goo 2 is a stunning work of technological and artistic achievement."
Coming back to a game like World of Goo must be incredibly daunting. Its iterative nature, the endlessly changing conceits, suggest that they must have exhausted all their best ideas when making it. I wondered if this was off-putting, this need to at least match their best.
“We decided that if we revisited World of Goo, time should have passed there too, and we should revisit that world in a way that is more how we remember it, not how it actually was.” Which leads to the notion of, rather than trying to pick up where the old game left off, instead considering what World of Goo can be in 2024. “What can we do now that we couldn’t do before?” says Gabler.
The first big change in this regard is that World of Goo 2 will—for the first time—contain actual goo. “World of Goo had Goo Balls, and it had roughly simulated regions of water,” says Gabler. “But there was no flowing gloopy oozy goo. Computers are much faster now, so we’re able to create actual flowing, splashing, simulated goo.”
This led to experimentations with liquid physics, which the team decided should form a core part of the sequel. “And along the way,” Gabler adds, “we kept discovering other neat things we could do, and new species of Goo Balls, with new abilities, often interacting with liquid in some way. With a physics simulation, there’s always neat new stuff to discover.”
Given that there are more than two people making the game this time, that presumably means a lot of fresh ideas are also being introduced via fresh brains. So who are they? Alongside Ron and Kyle are programmers Noel Llopis, Aleš Mlakar, Miguel Ángel Pérez Martínez, and Allan Blomquist, artists Peter Hedin and Jay Epperson, designer Kyle Gray, and musician Jonny Trengrove. And, of course, Dandy Wheeler doing PR.
I wondered, given that the original game had everything from its programming, art, design and music created by Gabler and Carmel, whether they struggle with delegating now that there’s an extended team to work with.
“There’s not much delegation needed,” says Carmel. “People tend to just take stuff on and do amazing things. My opinion of myself as a programmer has taken a hit seeing what this team makes happen. It makes me feel even better about my personal transition.”
If anything, the pair are trying to bring in as much as they can from their crew. Carmel adds, “I love the way Kyle invites other people’s talents into the game. For example, Aleš plays flamenco guitar on one of the tracks!”
The side of World of Goo that perhaps gets mentioned less is that underpinning its cute puzzles and brilliant mechanics is a pretty furious commentary on capitalism. Given how well that’s been going over the last 15 years, I asked if they would pick up on that beef, or if there were other things they were angry about.
“We have so many beefs,” says Gabler. “I have to say, though, as a game designer I wish I could design something so clever as capitalism. It’s the reason cool stuff gets built cheaper over time. If no one bought stuff, we wouldn’t be able to get better and faster stuff all the time. And I love stuff! I think about this clip often.”
But yes, World of Goo 2 pokes some fun. “Sometimes they’re big themes in the game,” Gabler adds, “sometimes just passive-aggressive little swipes at things that annoy us, or silly things we love.”
So, does this mean the band’s back together? Can we expect a third and fourth album? Or is this a reunion tour?”
“I’m never making another game again,” says Ron, “so this one better be good.”
“This is Cher’s farewell tour,” offers Kyle. “I’m hoping we wring out all possible ideas into this game so we can’t possibly ever make another one.”
But the final word goes to PR rep Dandy Wheeler: “OK, you maudlin little indie developers. We all know you’ll come crawling back for more.”
Reason: edit 1: added another post but it did the automerge; edit 2: typo
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This looks interesting, in the style of Diablo 2:
Yup, and what investors want is growth quarter to quarter, year over year. It is largely why platform holders have been, or will be, releasing on more platforms. Does not mean consoles are DOOMED, but its also clear that unless something gives, its pretty much the strategy going forward. Expand user bases and start to push subscription services or other add-ons to new users to continue that growth.
No wonder Xbox is branching out, the days of monolithic dedicated hardware based platforms are coming an end.
I loved ER but honestly something felt off in what they've shown in that trailer and I can't put my finger on what it is...
Still I can't be the only one rather cold for a 40€ dlc for a game released more than 2 years ago, at this point they should've just work on a sequel.
Still I can't be the only one rather cold for a 40€ dlc for a game released more than 2 years ago, at this point they should've just work on a sequel.
AlsoBurying the lede here:
I'm not sure what the strategy is, here.
Does deliberately pissing people off help drive sales?
That chart is leaving out the big reason why the lines are relatively stagnant- xbox's continued incompetence and decline. They declined by around 30m consoles last gen and at the rate they're going with series s/x they're going to end up around 10m short of the xb1...somehow. Look at the peak years on that graph it's right in the middle of the 360/ps3/wii gen where all 3 were doing really well at that point. Also it's a hardware spending chart so those years are likely including the DS and PSP too.
Sony and Nintendo have been in a long period of unprecedented success for themselves despite everything being said recently. Yeah ps4 or 5 may not reach the sheer unit sales of ps2 but you have to remember the last 30m or so of that system was practically handed out to people at $99 lol. Sony's about to set an all time record for console sales in a year, some of the hubbub is only because they're going to miss their insane goal they set and that's their own damn fault for setting the bar so high to begin with. Their main issue is getting their AAA budgets under control which is something every company is facing even multiplat 3rd parties that are on every system under the sun.
edit: I'm not trying to say everything is 100% rosy in the dedicated gaming space but I think a lot of the recent doom and gloom is severely overstated and not understanding all of the details of the data being presented. Also regarding the game budget thing what is the answer if you're not going to reel things in a bit? You can only port to a max of 4 systems, each with set limits on how well it can do (yes even PC). So once that becomes not enough what then, port to mobile? Good luck convincing mobile people to actually buy games. That's something companies have struggled with for a decade.
Sony and Nintendo have been in a long period of unprecedented success for themselves despite everything being said recently. Yeah ps4 or 5 may not reach the sheer unit sales of ps2 but you have to remember the last 30m or so of that system was practically handed out to people at $99 lol. Sony's about to set an all time record for console sales in a year, some of the hubbub is only because they're going to miss their insane goal they set and that's their own damn fault for setting the bar so high to begin with. Their main issue is getting their AAA budgets under control which is something every company is facing even multiplat 3rd parties that are on every system under the sun.
edit: I'm not trying to say everything is 100% rosy in the dedicated gaming space but I think a lot of the recent doom and gloom is severely overstated and not understanding all of the details of the data being presented. Also regarding the game budget thing what is the answer if you're not going to reel things in a bit? You can only port to a max of 4 systems, each with set limits on how well it can do (yes even PC). So once that becomes not enough what then, port to mobile? Good luck convincing mobile people to actually buy games. That's something companies have struggled with for a decade.
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It's pretty impressive PS4 will still get content like Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.
In the past that gen would have only got the yearly FIFA teams update without graphics improvements.
In the past that gen would have only got the yearly FIFA teams update without graphics improvements.
Sony's master plan to have a game that finally will implode PS4 shitty fans and have people buy a PS5
Assuming the DLC is quite large and of comparable quality to the base game, which are both relatively safe guesses, I'm not sure what difference it makes in practice whether it is labelled a "DLC" or a "brand spanking new game". It's not as though the gameplay and engine are flawed and need rethinking.
As far as I'm concerned, you can feed me new sprawling maps and dungeons in ER's engine on a (bi)yearly basis, and I will lap it all up with loud, happy slurps until I'm old and grey.
Also, Bloodborne PC.
It's very simple to me.
Consoles sales have a ceiling, consoles like the PS5 is selling really well, but that means the ceiling will be hit faster than previous.
Console companies also want more more, they want "endless" growth, they can't have endless growth when there is a ceiling for consoles sales.
So they are branching out to PC and mobile to help them out on the quest for endless growth.
I don't get this. They spent two years working on something that is (taking them at their word for the scope of it) a game, by any other name.
You have not been set back two years in your wait for your next game. After two years, you get a game.
If the problem you underline is "how long games take [to make]", publishing large DLCs is precisely what you want. Don't waste time and resources trademarking a new name, putting a new coat of paint on menus, and making changes to gameplay for the sake of being "new", reuse and recycle the perfectly good engine and assets you already have, and tell new stories with them.
Because at the end of the day it's still just more elden ring. They're stuck within the framework of that game, they can add things to it like more weapons and more bosses but you're not going to get anything that really sets it apart from the base 150 hour game. Expansions are almost always just more of the same it's just that the length of expansions has gone up from what we were used to years ago (which requires even more resources and time to make).
If you want iteration on existing parts of the game then you can still do that with a brand new game. GoW ragnarok iterated on the previous game's foundation but allowed for a much wider scope than an expansion could have, FF7 Rebirth is a game stuffed with tons of new content in only 4 years but that was only possible due to iterating on the previous game. If these games had large expansions in between that just pulls people away from making the sequels. That wasn't a huge deal when you could churn them out in a year max but now it just makes waiting for the next game that can evolve the gameplay or come up with big new ideas even more exhausting.
I don't understand how "more Elden Ring" is in any way a bad thing.
Because a new game can have more than just the same exact game again. An expansion largely can't.
Again though this wouldn't be as much of an issue if it didn't take two and a half years to come out. That's ridiculous.
Well now not let's get ahead of ourselves when the game is not even out yet.
I remember they also talked about new content for Remake and it turns out if was a bunch of unnccessary filler that made the game worse.
I also played the original VII for the first time just a few months before playing Remake, which didn't put Remake in a good light.
For that matter, I have already pre-ordered Rebirth for my PS5 because I still liked Remake and the Rebirth trailers makes the game look great, but Remake was still in different ways a letdown compared to the original.
If you like the base game though, more is always welcome.
If they announced 10 DLCs/expansions for Dark Souls I'd buy them all.
I'm basing that comment simply on what they've shown over the last year (arguably too much IMO). The amount of minigames they revealed is mind boggling, and we don't know if they kept more under wraps. We know about most of the towns the game will have and by the glimpses they've shown these are massively expanded from the original. Kalm is no longer a tiny single PS1 screen town it looks like an actual city now and the same can be said for gold saucer, junon and costa based on the previews. We also know most of the combat expansion details by now thanks to the demo as well as previews.
I mean I loved FF7R but I would not have wanted a ~20 hour expansion of it two years after it came out (scaling it down since 7R was a LOT shorter than ER) knowing full well that the game would still be stuck with all of the limitations 7R had. At that point I would have been pretty frustrated knowing that delayed Rebirth even more.
I'm not sure what the strategy is, here.
Does deliberately pissing people off help drive sales?
Reminds me a lot of early egsclusivity adopters like the ooblets people, yeah.
And i think they might be overestimating their brand — like other indie devs before them who went egsclusive. Just because your indie game sold well 10+ years ago (usually on Steam) doesnt mean the same is gonna happen with Part II ... I've said this before, but indie hits in 2008 or whatever had a way, WAY lower bar than any random indie game today.
Reason: typo
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Me neither, but that's because Elden Ring is a far better game than FF7R
Not that FF7R was bad. But Elden Ring is a "top 5 in a decade"-tier game for me and many others, and FF7R just isn't.
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This is true. Especially when there is a quite similar sequel to a popular indie game it is not unlikely for it to perform below expectations.
However, arguably you could also frame this as the devs being savvy: they don't expect their sequel to be nearly as popular as the first game, but get to charge Epic for exclusivity based on the popularity of that initial game. Unlikely, but it would be hilarious.
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor - The Road Ahead - Steam News
Hello Survivors, An amazing launch! What a week it’s been. First of all, a huge thanks to all of you for making the early access launch exceed our wildest imagination. We never imagined the game would sell more than 500.000 units in just a week. We are humbled, grateful, and very very busy...
Burying the lede here:
Also
I'm not sure what the strategy is, here.
Does deliberately pissing people off help drive sales?
What is this 2019-esque EGS energy? Because this kind of reply reeks of the early days of the store with the cheeky answers and pissing people off
Sure, but... what specific limitation is ER stuck with here?
For me, everything that I dislike about ER (and I dislike quite a number of things, despite having 500+h in it) is tied to matters of the balance of some attacks, the repetitiveness of some area types, and other things that do not require a radically different engine or gameplay mechanics to fix, just new content.
Souls became a genre for a reason: the gameplay, which scarcely changed since Demon's Soul, is pretty damn good as it is. Keep the gameplay, change the world in which it takes place, and the magic happens again. It's not a genre that needs to absolutely reinvent itself, mechanically, on a regular schedule, to remain relevant. Like a crocodile, it fits its intended ecological niche to near perfection.
It really is, I just did two quick runs and it has big "just one more run" energy going on. Definitely a fun deck builder with some interesting, yet seemingly simple mechanics.
Yeah, I'm having severe déjà-vu... I could swear I made a similar comment (whether in the privacy of my skull or as a post on these boards I do not remember) about another indie game whose... PR people? devs? were just rubbing it in.
Maybe it was ooblets.
Either way I'm confused by that attitude, and I genuinely wondered whether it's a deliberate strategy, along the lines of the "there is no such thing as bad publicity" school of thought. If so, it's certainly working on me, to an extent; I wouldn't have heard of either of those games otherwise.
Eh there's plenty of room to improve considering elden ring was a downgrade not only from their last game sekiro (not a totally fair comparison since it was a different team) but also over the previous games due to going open world and stripping out most of the great level design these games are known for. For example their next game could have gone back to a style like that, or moved in a slightly different direction the way sekiro did. It probably wouldn't because of ER's success which almost dictates they do the same thing again, but it could.
Sekiro is barely in the same genre. A single moveset linear action game vs a game with vast customisation and ability to reorder the challenges. Those games cannot seriously be put on a linear order.
And Shadow of the Erdtree may well be 95% "legacy dungeons" and virtually no open world. I don't know, and whether it is or not is irrelevant to the "new game vs DLC discussion", because within the bounds of it being an ER DLC, it could well go either that or the opposite way. It is not at all intrinsically limited in its ability to address that by being an ER DLC.
edit: I won't respond any further today; it's not a "mic drop, I'm right you're wrong bye", it's just that I'm going to bed, and that has priority over discussions. on the internet. Goodnight.
This.
I'm actually rather tired of the people who want to play a particular type of action game rather than an ARPG complaining that Souls games aren't predominantly action games (even though they never were). It goes back all the way to DS2 in my opinion, where much of the derision for it came down to people not liking that some stats now mattered rather than being irrelevant (which I would call a design improvement in an RPG).
The same people also almost invariably ignore all the parts of the full Souls experience that they personally don't care for (such as coop, or the variety and quality of spell-based builds, or NG+ mechanics). And you end up with games being declared "better" entries in apparently the same sub-genre that I (despite having 500+ hours in the Souls and ER games combined) have zer interest in playing.
Elden Ring and the Souls games are Action RPGs with non-linear (or at least branching) progression, impactful stats and RPG mechanics, online features including co-op and PvP invasions, a focus on exploration, and a large variety of viable and fundamentally different build options resulting in different moment-to-moment gameplay variations.
Skipping any part of this (or botching its execution) might not make a game worse for everyone, but it certainly does make it less of a Souls game.
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The Unicorn Overlord demo is straight up Ogre Battle except with massive, beautiful character models that are a staple of Vanillaware games. Super disappointing it isn't coming to PC as I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but I'm still playing the heck out of that sucker.
Worked for Ooblets, didn't it? Oh wait no it didn't.Also
I'm not sure what the strategy is, here.
Does deliberately pissing people off help drive sales?
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