>>22914

It's six years mate. The games industry itself has barely been a thing for thirty and it's already had one major crash in that time. Compare that to boom/bust patterns in other industries and come back to us.

As a couple of examples where I think my waiting policy has paid off - I'm looking forward to, but still haven't bought or played, Arkham Knight or No Man's Sky.

>>22914

>It's common knowledge that there's a shortage of skilled talent in the industry, but companies are still somehow able to overwork and underpay the very people that make the magic happen.

Those two things are contradictory. The isssue is that the people who want to work in games really want to work in games, so they will do it for fuck all. You will never get the additional staff without a huge increase in everyones wages because anyone else is willing to play the market to some degree.

People complain about how much people in the financial sector get, but honestly it is because the employees have their heads in the right place when it comes to handling a company, they need to treat everything as sociopathically transactional (even if it makes you a terrible human being in all other respects) because thats what the company is doing to you.


>>22913

> EA are looking like the next big one that could tank

Belguim litterallly starting an intiative to get Star Wars Battlefront 2 banned in the EU for crooked gambling. It had a horrific fall out of bad PR on reddit, and every form of non-corrupt press declairing it was lootboxed up the arse.

Despite everything sensible working against them EA sold 9 million copies of SW Battlefront 2 in 3 months, which was 90% of their projected figures.

Worse case scenario and loot boxes get banned, and no franchise will let them licence them, EA scales down to re-reasing the same sports related games every year for full price and rebuilds. They are absurdly bulletproof.

>>22899
The only time it's acceptable to pre-order is for Nintendo games. They do this bullshit planned scarcity thing where they'll only print x amount of copies and if you don't get one at launch, it'll cost you more for a new copy in 3 years time. They hold their value incredibly well, so pre-ordering and selling them on can sometimes reap benefits upwards of £10 within the first Month of release.

>>22912
>When was the last time a major studio or publisher went under because of poor sales?
Boss Key
Visceral
Telltale
Bioware, soon probably.

Just off the top of my head. EA has probably murdered a few more companies since Visceral, who knows.

>>22919
Which of those were genuinely down to poor sales rather than poor management?

>>22917
>Despite everything sensible working against them EA sold 9 million copies of SW Battlefront 2 in 3 months, which was 90% of their projected figures.
I bet someone got fired over that 10% shortfall. After all, this is EA and revenues anywhere short of literally all the money just isn't good enough.

I really do wonder whether the whole "$60 isn't really enough" argument really holds water anymore. Sure, production budgets have ballooned, but so has the audience. Go back 20 years and the suggestion that individual games would be shipping 9 million units in 3 months would have been laughably optimistic. These days it's a slight underperformance.

Of course, if the lootbox mechanic is eventually banned, expect to see the "£500 Super Duper Deluxe Special Edition with pre-pre-order exclusive content" become more common.

>>22899
Also this is shockingly far ahead for pre order, it's close enough to a year to not matter.
It looks like it has excellent single player and no multiplayer, and therefore, expect to see it in CEX for under a tenner on the playstation 4 a few years and 75p a few years after that.


I don't think you and I are typical consumers though, I just started playing the uncharted games because I could get the first 3 for under a fiver. but I am honestly disconnected enough from the hype to not care about the differance between a game that came out now and 10 years ago.

>>22922
RPS are being rather bitchy about it too:

I’ve got some exciting news for everyone who’s paying £50 for a game that doesn’t exist yet, over a year before it will be finished! Banks!

This is a pretty big deal, and an RPS exclusive, but we’ve discovered that instead of spending money on things you can’t have for literally no reason, you can instead put your money into something called a “bank”. These are big shops that look after money for you, and as a special treat for letting them do so, they add a little bit of extra money when you ask for it back! Not as much as they used to in the olden days, admittedly, but still.

It gets better! Because of banks there’s something called “inflation”. This has nothing to do with balloons, but everything to do with money being worth less as time goes on. So in a year’s time, £50 won’t be as much money as it is today! Not only can you make your money get bigger in a bank, but you can also buy the game for what’s essentially a cheaper price by buying it after the game is finished!

Expect to see this story ripped off across the gaming media, but you’ll know where you saw it first.

>>22944
Entertainment journalist in impulse purchase discovery SHOCKER.

What a navel-gazing twat. It's not as if the same gaming media hyping up disappointing triple-AAA titles in the first place played a part in the recent thirst for competently developed games, surely.

>>22944

RPS have long since jumped the shark. It used to be a place of witty and somewhat cynical independent journalism, but it sold out and succumbed to clickbait and controversy courting several years ago. The closest it gets to its old self are trash articles like this one, that try to sound pithy and clever, but instead just sound like a 22 year old media studies graduate wrote them.

What happened is all their good writers left, except for John Walker, who was always by far the worst one. When he had more influence he wanted to hire more women, which is fair enough; the problem is all the women who applied were clearly shit. So now half the writers are shit, because it's more important that they have a vagina than be able to write entertainingly.

I've been playing CKII tonight, and I was beginning to get irritated that half my vassals were angling for a civil war just because I was an emperor with absolute power, but then I realised they really had no reason to care about my imperial ambitions hundreds of miles away from their lands, and that Roman emperors, depending on the era, spent half their time fighting people within their borders.

Still wish the entire northern half of my empire would die and I could completely restructure it stop them kicking off ever again.

I've finally started playing Civ V, about 2/3 years after getting the complete edition on Steam.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't remember the last time I played a turn-based strategy game; it's been almost 20 years since I've even played RTS games (Cossacks and Red Alert 2) so I'm very rusty. I had a go at the tutorial but it absolutely drowns you in information and I'm not entirely sure what I'd achieved in over an hour of playing; I made a boat that does fuck all, I guess that's something.

I've been a semi-regular Elder Scrolls Online player for the last two or three years. It was never the best game in the world but it was the only MMO I've ever really been sucked in by. I got some tasty high end gear, made my character look like a complete badman, and I even got pretty fearsome in PVP.

I reinstalled it today after a couple of months off, to find they've completely butchered my class. For no real reason, so far as I can tell- It was well known to be the hardest one to do well with, it really didn't need nerfs, and I don't even say that out of simple favouritism.

I am left with that melancholy and hollow sense of grievance, knowing that no matter what, this game will never quite feel the same again. I knew that day would come, eventually, but alas. There may never be another one. I must now mourn this game, and my beloved nightblade, like a lost lover.

Sigh.

CCP is shaking up EVE Online a bit; they seem to be tackling the problem of Nullsec stagnation by increasing NPC aggression and removing local chat intel channels. It's a bit of a free for all out there, apparantly. CCP are also giving away a lot of SP these days, too; i guess to help new players and accounts. Might be an interesting time to check it out, if you've ever been interested before.

>>22991
Eh, that image was suposed to be transparent.

I finally got around to playing limbo, I hated it. Well hate is too strong of a word, it is unremarkable and was clearly over hyped. It does nothing that hadn't been done before and better. it's unique selling point was that it was in black and white and has a film filter over it, which I am cynical enough to presume was done to save money. it took me 3 hours to complete , and it took 30 people to make this, I assumed before the credits it was going to be a student project and I would have given them praise at least for effort, but no they don't even get that. It isn't well crafted or dense enough in detail to feel satisfying for that play time.

The story is minimalist, which is nothing new or impressive, Super Mario bros is minimalist story telling but to read the Wikipedia, you'd think this was fucking citizen Kane.

The world building is shit in that there isn't really any it is mostly just a collection of random objects that are easily recognizable in silhouette that people have read too deep into.

The game play is puzzle platformer, not with any kind of advancement in puzzles or building on what you learned previously though, this ain't no braid and it ain't no portal, although there are a fair number of times you could believe the developers just wholesale copied both.

In fact comparing this to braid it is overshadowed in every respect. I don't expect small studios to achieve big studio things but this is a waste of money. That 88 on meta critic is undeserved. Honestly this games only selling point is that it has a filter on it.

>>22993
Well I liked it.

>>22993
Limbo is an atmospheric platformer good for pleasantly passing a few hours. Braid is a pretty hard and at times frustrating game that the vast majority of people can't breeze through. They're not going for the same kind of experience at all.

>>22993

A few years ago popular wisdom would have had you believe that indie games were our saviours from AAA garbage. As it's turned out, they're almost without exception just shallow and pretentious rubbish, with no meat on the bones of their gameplay and an overabundance of attempted symbolism and subtext instead.

>>22996
The limbo player here

>they're almost without exception just shallow and pretentious rubbish, with no meat on the bones of their gameplay and an overabundance of attempted symbolism and subtext instead.

I don't think that is true. There is still decent stuff to have come from the indie scene, FTL was great, and I've clocked up well over a hundred hours on slay the spire. both have development teams under 5 people. POSITECH aka Cliff Harris makes some pretty interesting games on his own. And of course Minecraft was pretty good whilst indie, even if it was highly buggy back then. There is a long list of indie games I love.

None of them win indie game awards though because everything you just said is true of the people who decide and win those (mostly because they are the same people).

>>22996

That's just a particular branch of indie games.
There are other types - sim games get well served these days with the likes of Prison Architect, Rimworld and one of my favourites Parkitect, which is essentially just classic Rollercoaster Tycoon updated to 3D (and that was practically an indie game picked up by a big publisher in the first place).
Also of note are the number of throwback FPS games around at the moment. Maybe they're derivative and you could just play the classics, but I love it. Dusk is brilliant, and developed by about 3 people, and I've been playing Amid Evil now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBlTTW3RRtw

>>22998

>Amid Evil

That looks wonderful in concept, shame the visuals suffer a bit for lack of budget.

>>22999

The visuals are mostly intentional, for example all the first person weapon models are 2D sprites. There's no reason for that other than they wanted to do it.

I quite like it in motion, and the big blocky spaces make it easy to play through as it's quite hectic a lot of the time and getting stuck on scenery would be a drag. The only effect I don't like is the lack of texture filtering, it looks really grainy and a bit painful on the eyes sometimes.

It looks positively cutting edge compared to Dusk. I almost was put off by how 'retro' the graphics are in Dusk (some of the models are pretty much less detailed than Quake) but then the level design keeps progressing to ever better and weirder places and I just got absorbed into the feel of the game.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drD6pWAKnJk

>>23000

I'm not so sure. It looks more like one of those dodgy source-ports you could get for the original Quake in like 2004, which ported in modern lighting and bump mapping and everything. It looks weird. I'd prefer a more retro aesthetic to a retro shooter.

I heard someone playing Ain't That a Kick in The Head, and so now I'm playing Fallout: New Vegan. Again.

I've reinstalled a strategy game that I haven't played in years and joining a multiplayer game feels more intimidating than the time I asked that girl out who was my ex's best mate and we were 14. I can't stop thinking how out of practice I am, how the 300-ish people still playing it are going to be completely on the ball, with shortcuts that are second nature and army builds refined to within a nanometer of perfection. I think I'd rather be told I have to do fifteen minutes of stand-up in a ram-packed pub of pissed Glaswegians. I can't even join the "noob" games because my stats are still saved since the last time I played.

>>23009
Play StarCraft II. It's a better game and there are still noobs playing it.

>>23010
You're right... I don't want to become one of those sissy Starcraft weirdos, it's time to jump back into Wargame with both feet. And if I get wet, well, that's just the price of waging war.

>>23010
>>23011

SC2 is a fantastic game and I don't know why you assume it's the preserve of weirdos. The big attraction to me is that Starcraft has such a steep learning curve, it's a truly difficult game once you get out of the lower leagues. Unless you play Protoss, of course.

My only experience of SC2 is from watching this video

>>23013

Is he drinking a jug of strawberry milkshake?

>>23013
Grack 'Greg' Fields aka IdrA was always a whiny little gimp who was nowhere near as good as he thought he was. He spent so long complaining about the game he neglected to get any better at it, unlike the rest of the scene. I miss him for the entertainment value but he's no loss really.

>>23008
I don't have the patience for bugs and crashes like I used to. The anti-crash, 4GB and tickfix bugs used in various combinations ALL make the game crash more, and CASM (the autosave mod) has just... stopped saving even though it says it is, meaning I just lost about an hour of play.

Fuck's sake, Todd. Why didn't you give them more time? Not that it would have made a whole lot of difference, the Gamebryo engine is a heap of shit. Oh well, I have been having a bit of fun revamping Freeside in the GECK.

>>23016
Personally I've only got a decently playable experience by following along to the Fear and Loving list (https://wiki.step-project.com/User:EssArrBee/FalloutNewVegas). If you're willing to lose a couple days of your life then it's worth a spin but you won't get a bugfree experience.

The annoying thing that was never fixed in the game for me was how unnatural walking seems to be. It feels like your character is floating just off the ground.

I think the secret to enjoying Wargame is not to play more than one round a day. It's just too stressful.

>>23012
I don't really think that, but all I know about it that South Koreans like to take speed and play it in their cybercafes.

>>23018

This post somehow reminded me of an article I'd read about the OpenRA engine supporting Dune 2000, so I downloaded that and I've been indulging in some classic 90s westwood nostalgia.

However, the smug fucking bastards who developed it, while they did an excellent job for the most part of updating the engine (sort of in the same way as zDoom does for Doom) they've also infuriatingly decided to add shit like fog of war, weird particle effects, and a horrible new menu interface. They couldn't even just give us the menu options to enable a "classic" mode for those of us who want proper nostalgia.

Boiled my piss that did. It's so close yet just not quite right- I know the original 90s CnC games were an unbalanced mess, but that's the way I LIKED them god damn it.

>>23019
You liked having to wait until each single infantry unit was trained until you could set the next one to train? I'll admit I never played Dune 2k when it was new but the edits they made to the C&C games, like the build queue, make it playable in a time when we're accustomed to things not being so bloody obstinate.

>>23017
Unfortunately I can't install LOOT - the installer for some reason refuses to download VCRedist (even though I already have it installed by the trillion other programs that try and install it), so I can't do that.

Eventually I resorted to cheating since I didn't fancy fighting my way through Mr. House's security for the third time. It's not like you play Fallout for the combat really, anyway.

>>23020

That's all very well and good, I'm fine with quality of life features. But they've gone way further than that, they've dramatically altered the balance of the game. Which, again, is fair enough in principle, but they should have at least had the good manners to make it optional. It's essentially Skulltag for CNC I guess, it's a nice port but it's not concerned with being faithful to the original.

There's a separate port of sorts from CnCnet, which is completely faithful to the original- but that's really the exact opposite situation. It scales up the resolution and that's about it. It's not even Chocolate Doom in this analogy, it's one of those really early Boom versions.

>>22742

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AScCVzENcjs
MandaloreGaming made a review of E.Y.E. Devine Cybermancy. I like it. His style has changed a lot over time but he still makes quality reviews.

>>23023
Haha, mate, that was the video that convinced me to try it again before making that post to begin with. I'm sorry to say it didn't hold my interest for more than a couple of weeks. I think perhaps if the world it was set in wasn't hideously ugly I might have more time for it, even just some nice skyboxes would go a long way. As it is I just don't think it's for me.

>>23023
>>23024
Haven't watched the video but I have this in my list of unplayed. I bought it basically because other reviews summed it up as a 'heavily flawed version of Deus Ex', and the fact it was being compared to Deus Ex was reason enough for me to ignore the 'heavily flawed'.

>>23025
Could you elaborate on why it is considered flawed?

>>23027
Not him, but if you need someone to explain why EYE is flawed you might be an extraterrestrial.

>>23028
You gain Brouzouf.

>>23029
Oh, piss, I didn't mean to kill him.

Bought Rimworld. Underwhelmed. Music so far has been uninteresting, for the most part. Just seems like you watch the guys running around doing things. I built a little hut for my single naked character, then he died to a rat bite. Maybe i haven't put enough time into it - 45 minutes maybe. I'll play some more but i'm not holding out hope. It seems these days i'm into the type of game that rewards investment, but is imidiately playable. Skilled arcade types, i guess.

>>23031
You're probably not going to get much mileage out of it in that case. It's very much a sim despite it borrowing elements from the RTSs and RPGs of yore.

My recommendation would be to try out building bases and spawning raids in god mode. I do that when I can't be arsed grinding up a settlement and it's a refreshing change of pace.

I've been playing through vanilla Quake II recently, trying to get to a point where I can confidently strut around the world and know what needs poking and where I need to go. I don't want to speedrun the game, it's more of a memory exercise.

>>23031
Rimworld is occasionally described as "Dwarf Fortress Light". It is not a game you're expected to win at, the joy comes out of the ridiculous chaos that eventually collapses your entire empire. Then you try again, as you learned more about the rules, and maybe get a bit further. As >>23032 says, it's a sim at its core, the rest is just window dressing.