• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle










  • I also don’t buy his take that the game started development in 2016, this is what was big culturally in 2016, and the team just retreated into a bunker until launch and didn’t have any way to course correct.

    That’s not how game development works. I guarantee the headcount for this project didn’t peak in 2016 and stay steady. This was a low-priority item on a few people’s kanban boards for a couple years, probably had multiple starts, dead-ends, and reinventions.

    I have to think Sony saw the writing on the wall, pushed the project out the door because they didn’t think it would get any better barring significant reinvestment, and braced for the impact. I credit them just a tiny bit for not writing it off on their taxes and canning the project like Hollywood has been doing lately.



  • That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.








  • You, like the author, are just falling for console war nonsense

    You are sprinting to the defense of a multi-billion dollar company to call me a console war partisan. That is some American-politics level projection right there. I was a Sega kid. We lost the console war at the turn of the century. Now I go where the games are.

    If the Xbox is a console for people to play games, it’s not the only console on the market, so it needs to compete. If it gains feature parity with its direct competition…except that said competition has a quality stable of exclusive titles, then the console is going to struggle. Like say, moving 20% of the volume that their competitor does. Microsoft’s answer to this seems to be to forego adding the value of console exclusives to their own platform and instead releasing more of their first-party titles on Playstation and PC.

    That’s good for gamers, yes. It also flies in the face of any attempt to develop the Xbox as a platform choice. If I can afford one console per generation, why would I choose the Xbox over a Playstation? If I can afford multiple consoles, what does the Xbox offer that I don’t get already with the Playstation?