31–40 of 118 posts
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is dead ?.
Apparently not: https://insider-gaming.com/exclusive-beyond-good-evil-2-surv...
This is a 23-year-old game we're talking about here. The design work was complete long before anyone working on this project was hired by Ubisoft, and proven in the form of a game that shipped several console generations ago. Ubisoft presumably still has all of the original art assets for reference. All that had to be done was to study the original game code, port it for modern systems, and then polish up the visuals…
It depends what you mean by "original". The very first Prince of Persia game came out in the early 90s. It's at least 35 years old. It was noteworthy as being one of the first games (if not the first) to have ragdoll physics for the movement of the player. It was a game of playing through 12 levels (IIRC) and if you died, you started over completely. I played it for 20 hours straight at one point and ended up beating…
I dislike that an executive is quoted as blaming "rising development costs", essentially blaming the workers/salaries, with no rebuttal. This is especially suspect with the timing of closing an office that just unionized. It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the…
It looks like their business model is mostly just remakes and remasters now with these closures. Does the C suite really believe that they can just milk those IPs forever and never create anything new?
This is the business model for most of the large gaming companies at this point. Activision had three or four studios dedicated to Call of Duty leapfrogging each other to release one every year. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty ) Their last (2022, pre-acquisition) annual reports literally spell that out. > For example, in 2022, revenues associated with our three franchises—Call of Duty, Warcraft, and Cand…
Ubisoft games used to be varied and innovative and they boiled a dozen IP's down to the exact same open world slop with different coats of paint while sending loved unique titles like Splinter Cell to the graveyard.
It's like the companies who have tried to be the next Destiny or WoW. Those games did not become what they were by copying predecessors but by innovating and creating something new and unique that engaged gamers.
This is what killed Bioware. Decades of innovation, each game something new and different. Improvements on previous design, ne styles of game play... then it became let's just copy what we did last time and what everyone else is doing.
It looks like their business model is mostly just remakes and remasters now with these closures. Does the C suite really believe that they can just milk those IPs forever and never create anything new?
The creators and innovators in those acquired companies usually burn out from trying to work in a large, stifling corporate environment, and leave. So the large corporations are left with people who are not creators and innovators.
I dislike that an executive is quoted as blaming "rising development costs", essentially blaming the workers/salaries, with no rebuttal. This is especially suspect with the timing of closing an office that just unionized. It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the…
And lest we leave it merely implied, the problematic wages for the company are the workers, who make the products being sold. The wages of middle management + executives who allegedly steer the ship are magnitudes larger, but those are completely fine.
The problem is the large corporation wants to remove creativity from the process. They want a repeatable formula that they can scale and infinitely reproduce.
The wet dream for the modern AAA studio is a "game" like FIFA that has annual releases and loot boxes to gamble on to get better pixels. Call of Duty and similar games are the next best because it's user-generated content ("UGC"). They still have to invest to create maps, which they don't like doing. But you still have micro-transactions for skins so that's good (for them).
I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey a lot. Some people don't like it because it's too CRPG. That's why I liked it. They paid a lot of attention to the environment. I've heard of teachers using it to portray ancient Greece.
They managed this even though it was a little formulaic. I suspect that any future AC releases will be even more formulaic.
The one exception to this "large game studio = bad" rule had been Rockstar. The various GTA3 titles and GTA4 were widely renowned because of their social commentary and wit, as well as being groundbreaking (at the time) for open world games.
But GTA5 was a turning point for me. Yes it was a sprawling, beautiful environment but the writing was complete ass. It had none of the intelligence and insight of earlier titles. The characters were awful. But Rockstar seemingly didn't care because they're discovered the GTA Online money faucet, something I don't care about at all.
I really wonder if GTA6 will be beautiful but soulless. It coudl go either way. RDR2 was released after GTA5, after all.
These big studios really do have a habit of killing successful franchises or simply sucking the life out of them. There are few bigger fumbles than the EA SimCity fiasco. I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something. But honestly I haven't really felt compelled to play the franchise much since Civ4.
I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.